Reflection and Metacognition
Reflection and Metacognition
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #22
Hi there! I hope all is well with you right now, despite the many pressures schools and universities are under.
Also, welcome to the people who signed up to this newsletter at researchED Aberdeen at the weekend! I hope you find these weekly updates useful. And if any of you want to see my slides from the talk that I gave, you can find them here. The title: “Metacognitive Illusions: When Learners Misunderstand Learning.”
On the subject of CPD, some of you may be interested in the two online professional learning sessions that I run:
Memory and the science of learning – 30 Jan.
Study skills – 6 Feb.
Both can be found on our university website here, and are pretty inexpensive. They take place in the late afternoon UK time, 16:00–17:30.
Moving on…I previously mentioned that I would run through issues around metacognition in four main areas:
Before/planning
During/monitoring
After/reflection
Study skills
This week, it’s time to focus on the third of these – reflection, and other processes that occur after a learning task.
Reflections
I actually wrote about reflection as a metacognitive process back in July (issue 11), but the focus then was more on teacher reflection. Reflective practice is, of course, a part of how we improve our own skills.
But what about student reflections? What does the evidence say?
If you’ve been reading these updates, it perhaps won’t surprise you to say that students’ reflections are sometimes quite inaccurate!
To make this more concrete, let’s think of a specific situation: a student has just written an essay, or done a class test. Then you ask them how it went. Can they tell you how good their work was, or accurately predict the grade it will get?
There is evidence which suggests that:
Metacognitive accuracy improves across adolescence (Weil et al, 2013).
However, college students who made less accurate predictions of their grades scored lower on the actual test. That is, metacognition and performance are correlated (Vadhan & Stander, 1993).
Such findings highlight inaccurate self-efficacy. If students think are more skilled than they are, this may lead to poorer choices and preparation. Metacognition improves with age, but students with poorer metacognition are performing worse at college age.
This suggests that metacognition won’t take care of itself. Students need guidance.
Flawed memory
Another major factor in flawed reflection is our students’ tendency to misjudge forgetting.
This connects closely to a lot of what I have been saying about forgetting and long-term memory, in particular the idea of performance vs. learning. To briefly recap, we can judge performance immediately after a task, but learning can only be judged over a longer timescale.
Many classroom tasks boost performance but have a minimal effect on learning (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015). Students may leave the room feeling confident, having completed tasks and asked questions correctly.
But will they still remember the material in a few months’ time, or be able to use it in a different context? That is more uncertain!
All too often, we see that by the end of the course, students appear to have forgotten key details.
What all of this shows is student reflections are fallible. They are easily biased by current circumstances and recent events. While it’s good to ask students about their learning, that they are not always right about their learning.
That’s it for now!
Jonathan
Last week: Metacognitive Monitoring
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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