Hello! Welcome back to my memory and metacognition updates. I took some time off over April. I hope you also had a break at some stage.
I’ll now be publishing updates every Monday right up to the early summer. Think how much we can cover in that time! I look forward to sharing more ideas and research with you.
(As an aside – these Memory & Metacognition updates started in April 2022, so they’re now two years old! 🎂)
This week, and for the next couple of weeks, I want to work through some of the most essential starter metacognition techniques and principles. Things that I would prioritise if I was starting a new role, or moving to a school/centre where metacognition had not previously been emphasised.
Getting students ready
So, what do I mean by sparking the flame?
It’s vital for students to get engaged with the idea of metacognition in the first place (even if you don’t use that term).
They can hardly become metacognitively sophisticated learners if they don’t know that it’s possible to think about how they learn, and develop a toolbox of strategies.
As part of this, learners need to recognise that their intuitive judgements of learning are often wrong (as are ours—sorry, but it’s true! 😭).
Therefore, as part of developing successful learners, we need to make our students aware of metacognition. And if this has never been covered before, it’s time to get them ready for some changes to classroom norms.
Key Ideas to get across
Obviously, we need to start small and simple. Some of the key ideas I would aim to get across to a new group of learners as part of this sparking of the flame include:
That learning is a skill, and that just like any other skill, it can improve with training. This means that their ability to learn is not fixed or inevitable. They can, for example, learn effective new memory strategies.
That the workings of memory are not obvious. They can’t always rely on the accuracy of their own beliefs. For example, their perception of what they have learned or understood may be flawed, as mentioned above.
I think these are incredibly powerful foundations to share with students in any classroom.
Whether they realise it or not, our students already have a lot of metacognitive beliefs. They may think that success is just about being smart, or that it’s just about learning lots of factual content. The idea that they can develop their learning as a skill is a powerful message —but it must be supported in the right way.
We also need to make learners suspicious of their assumptions, such as confidence they will retain something studied today (which is performance, not learning).
Bjork (2018) talks about this as being ‘suspicious of the sense of ease’:
Bjork (2018). Being suspicious of the sense of ease and undeterred by the sense of difficulty: Looking back at Schmidt and Bjork (1992). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 146–148.
It’s a short paper that reflects back on earlier work, and encapsulates the idea of desirable difficulties very well.
For me, this is a foundation of metacognitive learning. Students and teachers alike need to know that effective study skills can’t be figured out through intuition or gut feelings, but can be gradually developed.
That understanding paves the way for more metacognitive insights…some of which I’ll cover over the next two weeks!
Just in case you happen to be free, I’m speaking about metacognition at researchED Aberdeen the weekend after next: Saturday 11 May 2024. Hope you can join us! Check out this tweet for more details.
All the best…and if you have students going into exams soon, good luck to them!
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.