Education & Career Trends: September 29, 2024
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
- Excerpts are taken from an article published on psychologytoday.com.
Metacognition is a high-order thinking skill emerging from the shadows of academia to take its rightful place in classrooms around the world. As online classrooms extend into homes, this is an important time for parents and teachers to understand metacognition and how metacognitive strategies affect learning. These skills enable children to become better thinkers and decision-makers.
In their research-based book, educational consultants Dr. Robin Fogarty and Brian Pete, get to the heart of why metacognition is important and how teachers and parents can teach metacognition to children from kindergarten through high school.
What Is Metacognition?
Metacognition is the practice of being aware of one’s own thinking. Some scholars refer to it as “thinking about thinking.” Fogarty and Pete give a great everyday example of metacognition:
Think about the last time you reached the bottom of a page and thought to yourself, “I’m not sure what I just read.” Your brain just became aware of something you did not know, so instinctively you might reread the last sentence or rescan the paragraphs of the page. Maybe you will reread the page. In whatever ways you decide to capture the missing information, this momentary awareness of knowing what you know or do not know is called metacognition.
When we notice ourselves having an inner dialogue about our thinking that prompts us to evaluate our learning or problem-solving processes, we are experiencing metacognition at work. This skill helps us think better, make sound decisions, and solve problems more effectively. In fact, research suggests that as a young person’s metacognitive abilities increase, they achieve at higher levels.
Fogarty and Pete outline three aspects of metacognition that are vital for children to learn: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. They convincingly argue that metacognition is best when it is infused with teaching strategies rather than taught directly. The key is to encourage students to explore and question their own metacognitive strategies in ways that become spontaneous and seemingly unconscious.
Metacognitive skills provide a basis for broader, psychological self-awareness, including how children gain a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Metacognitive Strategies You Can Implement as a Student
Fogarty and Pete successfully demystify metacognition and provide simple ways you can strengthen your ability to use these higher-order thinking skills. Below is a summary of metacognitive strategies from the three areas of planning, monitoring, and evaluation.
1. Planning Strategies
As you plan, you learn to anticipate the strengths and weaknesses of your ideas. Planning strategies used to strengthen metacognition can help you scrutinise plans at a time when they can most easily be changed.
One strategy is “Inking Your Thinking.” It is a simple writing log that requires you to reflect on a lesson you are about to begin. Sample starters may include: “I predict…” “A question I have is…” or “A picture I have of this is…”
Writing logs are also helpful in the middle or end of assignments. For example, “The homework problem that puzzles me is…” “The way I will solve this problem is to…” or “I’m choosing this strategy because…”
2. Monitoring Strategies
Monitoring strategies to strengthen metacognition helps you check your progress and review your thinking at various stages. Different from scrutinising, this strategy is reflective in nature. It also allows for adjustments while the plan, activity, or assignment is in motion.
Monitoring strategies encourage recovery of learning, as in the example cited above when we are reading a book and notice that we forgot what we just read. We can recover our memory by scanning or re-reading.
One of many metacognitive strategies shared by Fogarty and Pete, called the “Alarm Clock,” is used to recover or rethink an idea once you realise something is amiss. The idea is to develop internal signals that sound an alarm. This signal prompts one to recover a thought, rework a math problem, or capture an idea in a chart or picture. Metacognitive reflection involves thinking about “What I did,” and then reviewing the pluses and minuses of one’s action.
3. Evaluation Strategies
According to Fogarty and Pete, the evaluation strategies of metacognition “are much like the mirror in a powder compact. Both serve to magnify the image, allow for careful scrutiny, and provide an up-close and personal view. Having this enlarged view makes inspection much easier.
When you inspect parts of your work, you learn about the nuances of your thinking processes. “Connecting Elephants” is one of the many metacognitive strategies that can help you self-evaluate and apply your learning.
In this exercise, the metaphor of three imaginary elephants is used. The elephants are walking together in a circle, connected by the trunk and tail of another elephant. The three elephants represent three vital questions: 1) What is the big idea? 2) How does this connect to other big ideas? 3) How can I use this big idea? Using the image of a “big idea” helps one magnify and synthesize their learning. It encourages us to think about big ways their learning can be applied to new situations.
Metacognition and Self-Reflection
Reflective thinking is at the heart of metacognition. In today’s world of constant chatter, technology and reflective thinking can be at odds. Mobile devices can prevent young people from seeing what is right before their eyes.
John Dewey, a renowned psychologist and education reformer, claimed that experiences alone were not enough. What is critical is the ability to perceive and then weave meaning from the threads of our experiences.
The function of metacognition and self-reflection is to make meaning. The creation of meaning is at the heart of what it means to be human.
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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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