Metacognition


 * Metacognition: Sarah, Nick, Joe, Rich, & Ken

Metacognition "is thinking about your own thinking processes, including study skills, memory capabilities, and the ability to monitor your learning."

Metacognitive knowledge "is the knowledge about our own cognitive processes and an understanding of how to regulate those processes to maximize learning." There are 3 categories of metacognition: **
 * 1) Person Knowledge (delarative knowledge)
 * This category "refers to your understanding of our own capabilities."
 * 1) Task Knowledge ( procedural knowledge)
 * This category relates to how a task is either perceived as easy or difficult.
 * 1) Strategy Knowledge ( conditional knowledge)
 * This category looks at peoples capability for using strategies while learning new information.

Metacognitve regulation "is the purposeful act of attempting to control or own cognitions, values, emotions and beliefs. This allows us to function efficiently in learning environments. It also requires using executive control functions, which is a collection of mental processes including planning, monitory and evaluating strategies."
 * Planning: "involves scheduling learning strategies and selecting which strategies to use in different contexts."
 * Monitoring: "involves periodically checking on how well the planned strategy is working" (215).
 * Evaluating: "involves appraising the outcomes of the cognitive strategies used. This process measures to what degree our performance is affect by our planning and monitoring of selected learning strategies" (216).

As early as age 2, children realize that others have their own minds and this helps them understand how people feel differently from themselves. This is called **theory of mind**. There for four characteristics associated with this that are mainly related to spatial organization.
 * False beliefs: understanding that people can believe one thing and be wrong.
 * Appearance-reality distinctions: ability to understand that something can look one way but actually be something else. (ex: thinking a plastic spider is a real insect).
 * Visual perspective taking: views of visual objects differ based on ones perspective. (The gameboard looks upside down because I am sitting across the table).
 * Introspection: children's awareness and understanding of their own thoughts.

As the child ages from the school age years and into adolescence, they may have a better understanding of differentiating views based on perceived objects, but they still have difficulty differentiating between ones own thoughts and the thoughts of others. This is called **adolescent egocentrism** and comes with two specific consequences. Based on Piaget's theory, some say that the imaginary audience and personal fable are negative consequences as the child moves into formal operational thinking. This stage allows adolescents to use metacognition and leads them to think too much about themselves and what others think of them. The other argument is that these two qualities of adolescent egocentrism are coping mechanisms as a result of the changing relationship between the adolescent and their parents. In short, imaginary audience helps adolescents maintain their connectedness with others while personal fable helps to maintain their separateness and uniqueness.
 * 1) Imaginary audience: The adolescent imagines or believes they are the focus of attention in social settings due to a lack of differentiation between theirs and others thoughts.
 * 2) Personal fable: Adolescents believe that they are so unique that no one else can understand them or their situation.

Many biological and environmental factors affect the use and development of metacognition. Neurological impairments, as in autism, and frontal brain damage can impair development of metacognitive abilities. Environment, especially family conversations about beliefs, emotions, knowledge, how to learn and how to study, plays a role in metacognition. Children can also determine whether or not to use the metacognitive skills they have developed based on individual characteristics:
 * Belief about the nature of the task: if students think the information they are learning is easy, they will not used advance skills like planning and evaluating to learn it.
 * Motivation: students who are highly motivated invest more time and energy in metacognitive strategies
 * Prior knowledge about topic: the more students know about a topic, they better they are able to understand new info.
 * Prior success using metacognitive skills: successful use of metacognitive skills will lead to increased use of skills.

Applications for learning strategies While students may equate learning with memory skills, several learning strategies are associated with metacognition. 1. **Reciprocal teaching** is structured conversation between student and teacher involving four steps: As with many learning strategies, teachers need to model before they begin to practice with the student with the help of support. 2. **PQ4R**, an historical but popular method for teaching older children reading comprehension skills. Studies have shown that both of these strategies improve recall, understanding and important ideas in the text.
 * Reading comprehension:** the ability to extract information from reading materials, increases with age partly due to metacognitive skills and is supported by two instructional techniques.
 * Summarizing: students verbally summarize.
 * Questioning: students create questions based on the text.
 * Clarifying: students explain difficult parts.
 * Prediction: students make predictions about future content to test inference.
 * Preview: Consistent with executive control, students survey material by reading chapter headings, outlines and major topics.
 * Questions: Developing question from the preview allows for the opportunity to plan.
 * Read: Answer questions while reading.
 * Reflect: Take a break to reflect the material on prior knowledge.
 * Recite: Recite information from text to store in long term memory.
 * Review: Mentally think through the material to monitor the degree learned.
 * Writing skills** increasingly require metacognitive skills as planning, monitoring, evaluating and revising. Intervention strategies the improve writing skills allow teachers to:
 * provide instruction and modeling of planning strategies such as (1) determine the audience, (2) identify ideas, (3) outlining organization and (4) making rough drafts and revising.
 * provide assistance in monitoring and evaluating progress.


 * Note taking** also becomes increasingly important for metacognitive development of students as they move into middle school and into high school. It is also related to the level of academic achievement (222). To understand note taking, three functions must be understood in note taking:
 * Encoding: The process of note taking provides assistance in encoding of the material that goes beyond the simple process of listening to a lecture.
 * Encoding plus storage: Taking notes is the encoding process, but reviewing ones notes adds an additional benefit in learning important concepts in lecture. Studies have linked students note taking and reviewing notes to higher achievement rates.
 * External storage: Reviewing others notes on the lecture also has more benefits than just listening to a lecture.

Teachers can also play an important part of note taking by providing:
 * Lecture notes identifying important concepts. However, if a teacher provides to much detailed notes, this will not encourage students to hone their not taking skills.
 * Skeletal notes offers some scaffolding for students to learn key concepts, but also provides some space for students to fill in the gaps with their own notes.
 * Lecture cues, where teachers stress important ideas by writing key concepts on the board, repeating the information several times throughout lecture.
 * Students encouragement to audio or video tape the lecture. This provides a chance for greater recall by allowing students to hear the lecture and re-read their notes.
 * students the opportunity to share notes with other students. Tis allows students to reconstruct the concepts of the lecture, thus increasing the amount of important information recorded.

Note taking techniques are also crucial in the metacognitive development of students. Several studies have found that the use of matrix notes (figure 12.1:Matrix notes, p 225) compared to outlined notes (figure 12.1:Outline notes, p 224) have consistently resulted in greater learning (p. 224). Teachers can facilitate students in creating these notes by:
 * Providing a completed set of matrix notes to students.
 * Providing the frame work of matrix notes for students to fill out on their own
 * Providing direct instructions on how to construct matrix notes.