Metacognitive Monitoring

Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #21

Hello all! I hope you are doing well at this busy time of the academic year.

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Last time, I wrote about the metacognition involved in planning. Planning tasks are definitely metacognitive – they involve thinking about thinking/learning – and are subject to misconceptions about how learning works.

This week, the focus is on the here and now – the metacognition that happens while learners are in the middle of a task.

Metacognitive monitoring

Perhaps the most obvious 'here and now' process is what researchers call metacognitive monitoring.

In simple language, this means gauging how a task is going while you are doing it. As a pupil writes an essay, do they have an accurate idea of how well it is progressing? Can they keep an eye on the structure? Do they realise where they are making mistakes, or if a strategy isn't working?

Metacognitive monitoring can be quite hard. Each learning task is demanding of working memory, making it difficult for learners to simultaneously think about strategies or evaluate progress.

I will come back to some practical suggestions. First, though, I'd like to raise a couple of areas where perceptions about learning are really inaccurate...

Beliefs about learning

There are a number of areas where students' flawed beliefs appear to lead to their making incorrect judgements of how well or how fast they are learning.

Some of these link to the desirable difficulties that I have discussed before. For example:

• Although spacing is more effective, learners tend to incorrectly believe they are learning best via massing.

• Learners tend to incorrectly believe that they are learning effectively via strategies like re-reading and highlighting.

• Learners incorrectly believe that they are learning better via 'blocked' examples than interleaved ones.

One really curious finding was uncovered by Singer Trakhman, Alexander and Berkowitz (2019). They found that while students read texts on screen faster and believed they were learning better, they actually showed much better comprehension after reading on paper.

I link to the study below.

Singer Trakhman et al (2019) – “Effects of Processing Time on Comprehension and Calibration in Print and Digital Mediums”

I was fortunate to see Patricia Alexander speak about this and other research in a keynote talk back in the summer. It's curious to consider that the very things that make online text and blogs easier to read might also reduce our learning from these sources.

And all the while, the learner thinks they are learning better!

This surely has implications for online learning environments, the use of ipads in the classroom, and the like.

Strategies

So, what strategies can educators apply to support their students' metacognition during tasks? I have five suggestions:

• Giving learners a ‘nudge’ to remind them to stop and reflect. As noted above, learners' working memory will be occupied by the task at hand. Most will fail to stop and think about how a task is going. A teacher can ask the whole class to pause, to silently think about progress for a minute, and then re-focus on their next steps.

• Encouraging students to find their own solution when they are stuck, instead of asking the teacher/tutor for help.

• Over the longer term, building up a set of tools to support independent learning in your subject, so that learners know how to recognise and tackle common problems.

• Encouraging learning, rather than completion of the task. Students should think about what they are doing and why. It shouldn’t be (just) about finishing a set list of tasks, but also about thinking whether they have learned what they set out to learn.

• Inviting a class/group to reflect on why they succeeded in a task. If a student has done well, invite them to think about why it went well. This is especially valuable if they failed a similar task in the past.

That’s all for now. I hope some of these strategies will be useful in your setting.

Next week, I will focus on the reflections that happen after a task, and how it can be affected by biases and forgetting. I'll also be speaking on a podcast about study skills very soon – I'll share the link when I have it!

All the best,

Jonathan

Last week: Planning and Metacognition

Next week: Reflection and Metacognition