Metacognition and Writing

Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #37

Hello! I hope you are doing well.

As today’s title suggests, a few ideas around metacognition and writing this week. It’s something I’ve recently drafted a chapter on. After that, I’ll be taking a break, returning after Easter.

Beliefs about writing

First off, I think that writing is an area where there are a lot of flawed metacognitive beliefs. Students may sometimes think that prowess is a matter of talent rather than a skill that can be learned. Even if they do appreciate the need to work at writing, they might not know how to improve.

• A suggested strategy here is to tackle misconceptions head on. Compare writing to other skills such as learning a musical instrument or a sport, helping a class to see how important practice really is.

Writing as consolidation

Writing may also be seen by some educators as a useful consolidation strategy. That’s not entirely wrong—as mentioned last week, there is a retrieval practice element to closed-book writing.

At the same time, students are not going to be able to write a strong piece on a topic until they have fully grasped the content that they are writing about. Setting essay tasks early in the process may make it harder for students to engage deeply with the material or retrieve it from memory, and instead to take shortcuts.

• A suggested strategy is to schedule writing tasks later in the process of studying/learning a topic, rather than making it a default homework task. Also, consider the dual benefit of writing as both consolidation and practice of a skill in its own right.

Before, during and after

I’ve mentioned before that we can consider metacognitive processes before, during and after a task. This is a useful framework when considering writing.

Before the task, a student thinks about what is expected. However, they may have relatively little knowledge of what a ‘good’ piece of writing looks like.

During the task, the writer may think about how their piece is progressing, but because writing is demanding, it fully occupies working memory.

After the task, learners may think about how well they have performed. However, in line with the broader literature on metacognition, it is reasonable to suppose that such judgements may be inaccurate.

• Strategies here will depend on the stage of the task. Prior to a task, discussion of audience and purpose could be valuable, not least when writing exam-focused work. During, students may need guidance to pause and reflect on progress, rather than trying to do this as they write. And afterwards, they may benefit from using specific criteria when judging their own work.

Editing

Another flawed belief about writing which many students may hold is that it is all about the first draft, or (a connected misconception), that editing is all about correcting mistakes (Sommers, 1980). In fact, as most of you will be aware, reworking a piece is an essential part of skilled writing.

• As well as raising awareness of the importance of editing, learners could be guided to tackle one skill at time, so that they don’t feel overloaded. They could reflect on their use of vocabulary one week, another week look at their own use of evidence, and in a later week focus on linking words and sentence length, for example.

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I hope that was helpful! As I mentioned above, it’s time for me to take a little break from writing these updates over the Easter period. I’ll be back in mid-April. If you have a holiday coming up, I hope you enjoy it 😎

Jonathan

Last week: Retrieval Practice: How and Why

Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk

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