Metacognition in Educational Theory and Practice

Douglas J. Hacker, John Dunlosky, Arthur C. Graesser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781135687410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume presents the most current perspectives on the role of metacognition in diverse educationally relevant domains. The purpose is to examine the ways in which theoretical investigations of metacognition have recently produced a strong focus on educational practice. The book is organized around four general themes relevant to education: metacognition and problem solving, metacognition and verbal comprehension, metacognition and the education of nontraditional populations, and metacognition and studentship. Chapter authors review current literature as it applies to their chapter topic; discuss theoretical implications and suggestions for future research; and provide educational applications. Each chapter describes testable theory and provides examples of how theory can be applied to the classroom. The volume will have wide appeal to researchers and students concerned with the scientific investigation of metacognition, and to practitioners concerned with the cultivation of learning and achievement in their students. The unique contribution of this book to the literature on metacognition is its presentation of the most current research examining specific theoretical aspects of metacognition in domains directly relevant to education. This is especially valuable for the many researchers and practitioners who subscribe to the concept that by fostering metacognitive processes during instruction, more durable and transferable learning can be achieved.

1

Definitions and Empirical Foundations

Douglas J. Hacker

The University of Memphis

A diligent 12th-grade student sits attentively in her pre-calculus class trying to follow the teacher’s first lesson on the fundamental theorem of integral calculus. The teacher is using the analogy of finding the area under the sinuous track of a roller coaster to instruct the concept of area under a mathematically defined curve. The steel girders holding up the track circumscribe rectangular columns whose widths can become increasingly smaller, and with increasingly smaller widths a closer approximation of the total area under the track can be obtained. Our student recalls the section in her mathematics textbook that she studied the night before, and she is beginning to make the connection between the textbook’s presentation and the teacher’s analogy. She knows how to calculate the area of a rectangle, and she understands how she can use what she knows to find the total area under the track by adding all the rectangular columns of area under the track. However, she has not quite arrived at how the total area would be affected by making the widths of the columns increasingly small. She realizes that she does not understand, and she tries to increase her concentration on the teacher’s explanation and on the diagram of the roller coaster drawn on the blackboard. Unfortunately, her attempts to increase concentration are failing because two students sitting behind her are distracting her with whispers about what happened to a mutual friend over the weekend. And to add to her difficulties, the teacher’s use of the roller coaster analogy has reminded her of last summer’s vacation to Disneyland. Memories of the fun she had there on the roller coaster are further interfering with her thoughts of the problem at hand. She decides to redouble her concentration and is able to filter out the students’ whispers. She then also realizes that her memories of Disneyland can be used if she focused attention specifically on memories of the superstructure that supported the roller coaster. Her insight, however, is interrupted when she hears the teacher tell the class to take out a piece of paper for a surprise quiz on the material just covered. Our diligent student is hit with a sinking feeling in her stomach because she knows that she did not understand the lesson, and her poor performance on the quiz will likely bring her average for the course down to a “C.”

Many of the thoughts and feelings experienced by this 12th-grade student as she attempts to take charge of her learning can be described as metacognitive: realizing she does not understand, deliberately increasing her concentration to block out environmental distractions, and consciously using her memories of Disneyland to progress toward understanding. What makes these thoughts or feelings “metacognitive” as opposed to simply cognitive is not easy to describe (Nelson & Narens, 1990). Descriptions are difficult because metacognition is, by its very nature, a “fuzzy concept” (Flavell, 1981, p. 37), made even fuzzier by a ballooning corpus of research that has come from researchers of widely varying disciplines and for widely varying purposes.

The purpose of this chapter is to cut through the fuzziness surrounding the concept by describing the characteristics of metacognition that have remained relatively constant across disciplines and purposes since John Flavell’s pioneering work helped give form to the concept and whose call for research provided an impetus for its study. In addition, greater understanding of metacognition can be gained by knowing how it has been investigated. Therefore, a brief review is given of the ways in which metacognition has been operationalized and investigated. By attempting a definition of metacognition and describing how researchers have come to know the concept, some of the fuzziness should be resolved.

FLAVELL’S CONTRIBUTION

It [memory development] seems in large part to be the development of intelligent structuring and storage of input, of intelligent search and retrieval operations, and of intelligent monitoring and knowledge of these storage and retrieval operations—a kind of “metamemory,” perhaps. Such is the nature of memory development. Let’s all go out and study it!¹ (Flavell, 1971, p. 277)

What is basic to the concept of metacognition is the notion of thinking about one’s own thoughts. Thinking can be of what one knows (i.e., metacognitive knowledge), what one is currently doing (i.e., metacognitive skill), or what one’s current cognitive or affective state is (i.e., metacognitive experience). To differentiate metacognitive thinking from other kinds of thinking, it is necessary to consider the source of metacognitive thoughts: Metacognitive thoughts do not spring from a person’s immediate external reality; rather, their source is tied to the person’s own internal mental representations of that reality, which can include what one knows about that internal representation, how it works, and how one feels about it. Therefore, metacognition sometimes has been defined simply as thinking about thinking, cognition of cognition, or using Flavell’s (1979) words, “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena” (p. 906).

In Flavell’s description just quoted, the idea that metamemory involves intelligent structuring and storage, intelligent search and retrieval, and intelligent monitoring suggests that metacognitive thoughts are deliberate, planful, intentional, goal-directed, and future-oriented mental behaviors that can be used to accomplish cognitive tasks (Flavell, 1971). Metacognition is an awareness of oneself as “an actor in his environment, that is, a heightened sense of the ego as an active, deliberate storer and retriever of information” (p. 275). It is the development of memory as “applied cognition” (p. 273), in which whatever “intellectual weaponry the individual has so far developed” is applied to mnemonic problems (1977, p. 191).

Often, further definition of a term can be gained by considering its source. Therefore, further definition of this fuzzy concept may be gained by considering a source of, or at least a likely contributor to, Flavell’s idea of “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena”: Jean Piaget. Among Flavell’s many notable accomplishments is his work that introduced Piaget to many people in the United States. The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget (Flavell, 1963) has had tremendous impact on how researchers, practitioners, and the general public conceptualize child and adolescent cognitive development. Although recent advances in developmental psychology have indicated a need to modify some of Piaget’s work, many of those advances in fact found their impetus in Piaget’s theories.

The idea of deliberate, planful, and goal-directed thinking applied to one’s thoughts to accomplish cognitive tasks is deeply embedded in Piaget’s conceptualization of formal operations in which higher ordered levels of thought operate on lower ordered levels. During this stage of cognitive development, the abilities of the adolescent begin to differentiate from those of the child. Flavell (1963) wrote:

What is really achieved in the 7-11-year period is the organized cognition of concrete objects and events per se (i.e., putting them into classes, seriating them, setting them into correspondence, etc.). The adolescent performs these first-order operations, too, but he does something else besides, a necessary something which is precisely what renders his thought formal rather than concrete. He takes the results of these concrete operations, casts them in the form of propositions, and then proceeds to operate further upon them, i.e., make various kinds of logical connections between them (implications, conjunction, identity, disjunction, etc.). Formal operations, then, are really operations performed upon the results of prior (concrete) operations. Piaget has this propositions-about-propositions attribute in mind when he refers to formal operations as second-degree operations or operations to the second power. (pp. 205–206)

Inhelder and Piaget (1958) provided further elaboration on second-degree operations: “… this notion of second-degree operations also expresses the general characteristics of formal thought—it goes beyond the framework of transformations bearing directly on empirical reality (first degree operations) and subordinates it to a system of hypothetico-deductive operations—i.e., operations which are possible” (p. 254). Thus, first-degree operations, which are thoughts about an external empirical reality, can become the object of higher order thoughts in an attempt to discover not necessarily what is real but what is possible. “Formal thinking is both thinking about thought [italics added] … and a reversal of relations between what is real and what is possible” (pp. 341–342,). Referring to Inhelder and Piaget’s work, Flavell (1977) wrote: “Another way to conceptualize it is to say that formal operations constitute a kind of ‘metathinking,’ i.e., thinking about thinking itself rather than about objects of thinking. Children certainly are not wholly incapable of this and other forms of ‘metacognition’” (p. 107).

Eight years after his call for metamemory research, Flavell (1979) acknowledged the wide interest and promise of this “new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry” (p. 906). At that time substantial work that would eventually be viewed as foundations of metacognitive research already had been accomplished by many others: Brown (1978), Belmont and Butterfield (1969), Corsini (1971), Hagen and Kingsley (1968), Hart (1965), and Markman (1977), to name only a few. And their areas of interest included such diverse topics as “oral communication of information, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, reading comprehension, writing, language acquisition, attention, memory, problem solving, social cognition, and various types of self-control, and self-instruction” (Flavell, 1979, p. 906). This work on metamemory added significantly to the information-processing paradigm that had emerged shortly before through the theorizing of researchers such as Newell, Shaw, and Simon (1958), Miller (1953), and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). Key to this new psychological paradigm was the conceptualization of thought as the flow of information in and out of a system of mental structures. Questions concerning how information is stored in and retrieved from those structures, how the structures develop with age, and how storage and retrieval are controlled drew the attention of many researchers.

Flavell’s (1979) model of metacognition and cognitive monitoring developed from answers to many of those questions. According to his model, a person’s ability to control “a wide variety of cognitive enterprises occurs through the actions and interactions among four classes of phenomena: (a) metacognitive knowledge, (b) metacognitive experiences, (c) goals (or tasks), and (d) actions (or strategies)” (p. 906). Metacognitive knowledge refers to one’s stored world knowledge that “has to do with people as cognitive creatures and with their diverse cognitive tasks, goals, actions, and experiences” (p. 906). It consists of one’s knowledge or beliefs about three general factors: his or her own nature or the nature of another as a cognitive processor; a task, its demands, and how those demands can be met under varying conditions; and strategies for accomplishing the task (i.e., cognitive strategies that are invoked to make progress toward goals, and metacognitive strategies that are invoked to monitor the progress of cognitive strategies). Metacognitive knowledge may influence the course of cognitive enterprises through a deliberate and conscious memory search or through nonconscious and automatic cognitive processes. Metacognitive knowledge may lead to a wide variety of metacognitive experiences, which Flavell describes as conscious cognitive or affective experiences that accompany and pertain to an intellectual enterprise.

A look at the aforementioned 12th-grade student will illustrate the components of Flavell’s model of metacognition. The use of metacognitive knowledge can be inferred in at least three parts of the vignette. The first occurs when the student gains the metacognitive knowledge of how her knowledge of calculating the area of a rectangle can be used to obtain an approximation of the total area under the roller coaster by adding all the rectangular areas under the track. The use of metacognitive knowledge can be inferred again when she realizes that her memories of Disneyland, rather than being distractions from the task, can be used to accomplish it: She has knowledge of the superstructure of the roller coaster at Disneyland, and she has metacognitive knowledge of how to use that knowledge to enhance the teacher’s roller coaster analogy. The third illustration of metacognitive knowledge occurs near the end of the vignette when the student assesses her understanding of the lesson and realizes that she does not know the material well enough for the quiz. In this case, she has metacognitive knowledge of what she does not know.

Metacognitive experiences also are illustrated in three parts of the vignette. Once she understands how to use her knowledge of calculating the area of a rectangle to obtain an approximation of the total area, she has the metacognitive experience that there is something she still does not understand. What eludes her is the understanding of how increasingly accurate approximations of the total area can be obtained with increasingly smaller widths of the rectangles. Another metacognitive experience occurs with the insight that her own personal experiences of the roller coaster at Disneyland can be used to enhance her understanding of the teacher’s roller coaster analogy. Finally, when she hears about the quiz and assesses her lack of knowledge, the resulting metacognitive experience leaves her with the sinking feeling in her stomach that her grade for the course is going to suffer.

Strategy use is also illustrated in the vignette. In response to her metacognitive experience that she still does not understand how to obtain increasingly accurate approximations of the area, she increases her concentration on the teacher’s explanation and on the diagram on the blackboard. Her use of this simple strategy may have been a nonconscious automatic response that she had acquired over years of learning, or it may have been the result of her conscious and deliberate choice. In the latter case, then, that choice likely required metacognitive knowledge of the task and of herself as a problem solver. Metacognitive knowledge of the task would be required to provide understanding of how she had previously managed the demands of tasks that she perceived to be similar to the one at hand; and metacognitive knowledge of herself would be required to provide understanding of whether she, as a problem solver, could meet those demands.

Unfortunately, her strategy immediately failed because of unforeseen environmental distractions and because the teacher’s use of the roller coaster analogy created cognitive interference that further distracted her. In the face of these distractions, she continues to rely on her selected strategy and puts forth even more effort to concentrate on the task. Her strategy proves successful in filtering out the students’ whispers, and it also leads to the insight about her memories of Disneyland. Once again, however, she is distracted from the task by the disturbing news of the quiz. Her metacognitive judgment that she has not learned the lesson fills her with dread of the outcome.

Thus, the vignette illustrates that metacognition involves “active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration” of cognitive processes to achieve cognitive goals (Flavell, 1976, p. 252). Monitoring, regulation, and orchestration can take the form of checking, planning, selecting, and inferring (Brown & Campione, 1977), self-interrogation and introspection (Brown, 1978), interpretation of ongoing experience (Flavell & Wellman, 1977), or simply making judgments about what one knows or does not know to accomplish a task. However, the vignette also illustrates that along with the ideas of “active” and “conscious” monitoring, regulation, and orchestration of thought processes is the possibility that thinking about one’s thinking, through repeated use or overlearning, may become automatized and consequently nonconscious.

…conscious monitoring of mnemonic means, goals, and variables may actually diminish as effective storage and retrieval behaviors become progressively automatized and quasi-reflective through repeated use and overlearning. The metamemory–memory behavior link of the older child is not thereby extinguished, of course. However, the need for it to become clearly conscious may well diminish as the behaviors it once mediated become more self-starting. (Flavell & Wellman, 1977, pp. 28–29)

As already mentioned, the 12th-grade student’s use of the simple strategy to increase concentration may have been a conscious and deliberate choice, or it may have been a nonconscious automatic response developed over years of repeatedly attributing learning of difficult material to greater effort (e.g., Nicholls & Miller, 1984). If nonconscious and automatic, does her strategy use illustrate a metacognitive process or is it simply a cognitive one? At one time her response may have been conscious and deliberate. Should thoughts that were once metacognitive but have since become automatic through repeated use and overlearning still be called metacognitive? Automatic cognitive processes may involve knowledge and cognition about one’s own cognitive phenomena just as metacognitive processes do.

However, because people are likely to be aware of only the products of nonconscious automatic processes and not the processes themselves, it is difficult if not impossible for people to report on them (cf. Ericsson & Simon, 1980). Accordingly, it is difficult if not impossible for researchers to know whether automatic cognitive processes reflect people’s beliefs in what pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword Metacognitive Food for Thought in Educational Theory and Practice
• Preface
• 1 Definitions and Empirical Foundations
• 2 Verbalization and Problem Solving
• 3 Smart Problem Solving: How Metacognition Helps
• 4 Metacognition in Mathematics From a Constructivist Perspective
• 5 Knowing How to Write: Metacognition and Writing Instruction
• 6 Test Predictions Over Text Material
• 7 Influence of Knowledge Activation and Context on Comprehension Monitoring of Science Texts
• 8 Self-Regulated Comprehension During Normal Reading
• 9 Metacognition, Childhood Bilingualism, and Reading
• 10 Impaired Awareness of Deficits in a Psychiatric Context: Implications for Rehabilitation
• 11 Training Programs to Improve Learning in Later Adulthood: Helping Older Adults Educate Themselves
• 12 Studying as Self-Regulated Learning
• 13 SMART Environments That Support Monitoring, Reflection, and Revision
• 14 The Metacognition of College Studentship: A Grounded Theory Approach
• Epilogue Linking Metacognitive Theory to Education
• Author Index
• Subject Index