Metacognition in Young Children

Shirley Larkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135220440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Metacognition is known to be an important factor in academic achievement; however it is also important in a wider life context. The ability to reflect upon how we are thinking can help us to make wiser decisions in all aspects of our life.

This book addresses how metacognition might be fostered in young children. Examining theories of particular relevance to primary school age children the author combines her empirical work over the last 8 years with the work of other researchers to show that children of all ages display metacognitive processing, given the right kind of environment. Drawing on evidence from psychology and education, Metacognition in Young Children brings together international research from different curriculum areas. As well as the traditional areas of science, mathematics and literacy, the author considers metacognition in physical education, art, drama and music. The book argues for a development of metacognition theory, which takes account of wider contextual and political factors. This book includes:

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• Real classroom examples, taking account of the whole child, socio-cultural context and the curriculum

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• Practical examples of developing metacognition across the curriculum

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• Advice on building metacognitive environments in the classroom

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• Development of metacognition theory

Essential reading for educational psychology and research students, this book will appeal to trainee and practising teachers with an interest in facilitating young children's development into wise and thoughtful adults. It offers practical advice supported by theory and evidence.

Part I
Metacognition in children and adults

Chapter 1
What is metacognition?

It is at least conceivable that the ideas currently brewing in this area could someday be parlayed into a method of teaching children (and adults) to make wise and thoughtful life decisions as well as to comprehend and learn better in formal educational settings.

(Flavell, 1979, p. 910)

What is this area? This area which can help people to understand better, to learn better, to achieve better academic results and for me, the most important part – to make “wise and thoughtful life decisions”? When John Flavell wrote this in 1979 he was giving a name to a process of thinking which we all engage in at sometime, but which we rarely sustain long enough to gain the benefits from. Flavell was referring to the process of reflecting on our own thinking and keeping track of how our thinking is getting us closer to or further away from our goal. The term “metacognition”, which Flavell and his colleague Ann Brown gave to this type of reflection has led to a whole new area of research and the fruits of these studies are now being seen in classrooms across the world. At the same time though, the word metacognition has sent some people running for the hills. When I ordered a book recently with the “M” word in the title, the book shop assistant checked the title with me at least half a dozen times as she tried to track down my order. Every time she asked a colleague, she would turn to me again and say “What was it called again?”When I proposed the title for this book some colleagues suggested that using the “M” word in the title would put readers off all together and I should make it more reader friendly by using phrases such as “higher order thinking” or “reflective thinking”. Why did I stick to my guns about the title? Well, the term metacognition, while a bit unwieldy, is specific and identifies a particular process of a shift in thinking.“Meta” refers to a change of position, a sense of going beyond or to a second order or higher level, and “cognition” refers to our faculty of knowing or thinking. So the “M” word describes a higher order of thinking, one that is reflective and goes beyond the ordinary level to reflect on thinking itself.

An example will clarify the distinction between the different levels of thinking. I may think “I will stop for a cup of tea now”, an ordinary level thought, but if instead of immediately acting on that thought, I stop and take a little time to reflect, I might think about why I had that thought in the first place. Is my body telling me that I am dehydrated? Or do I have an internal body clock which is tuned into sending me certain signals at certain times of the day? Perhaps the reason for my thought was not related to thirst but to feeling tired or bored or stuck or even in need of a reward for having done some work today. From any one of these thoughts I could follow where my own thinking leads. I may become interested in any one of a number of areas from philosophy to neuroscience and biology. I might choose to pursue one of these areas and start an internet search, or I might choose to ignore all these thoughts and return to writing this chapter. On the other hand I might act on this thought and make a conscious decision to stop and make tea. Becoming aware of all the different thoughts which might lie behind my initial thought means that I have shifted my position from the ordinary level of thinking to thinking about the thought itself; why I had that thought, how it was linked to my biology, emotional state or psychology, and then to make a conscious decision about what to do about the thought. At the same time, while writing this, I have been partially monitoring that initial thought and occasionally checking back in to see if I still really want a cup of tea or if the moment has passed. From the initial fairly ordinary thought, I have been on a thinking journey about the thought itself and have brought my past knowledge about myself, about what a cup of tea would do for me and about whether I want to stop what I am doing to make one to bear on my decision to wait a little while longer and then have a proper break.

All of this second order thinking, or thinking about the thought itself, is metacognition. I hope you can see that from one very simple thought I could shift my thinking position in order to reflect on the thought and make a good decision, at least a decision that is right for me at this time. So, if one thought as simple as “I want a cup of tea” can lead to thoughts which might fire my curiosity about many subjects that I don’t know about, might motivate me to learn something new or as in my case keep me centred on the task I’m engaged in, then you can see that the power of using metacognition in educational settings is vast.

In everyday life, particularly in social situations, we may make this shift in thinking quite often; for instance how many times have you reflected on why you said something to somebody, or why they seem to think that about you, or whether they know that you know that they know etc. In general, however, in our educational settings we are not encouraged to reflect in this way. The aim of many teachers is to keep children on task, solving the maths problem, writing the story or practising one of the several very necessary skills children need to acquire for life outside of school. The aim of many children is to complete the work as quickly and as successfully as possible. The rewards for this may be a chance to play, or at least not to have to do the work again, or some form of praise from the teacher. It is not only children who think this way, many adults too aim to complete their work as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they can go and do something more enjoyable or so that they can gain their hard earned reward more quickly. Unfortunately, metacognition doesn’t fit into this way of working very well. It can lead to more efficient and thus quicker ways of working, but it also entails a slowing down of the process of thinking.

However, the rewards can be increased motivation and interest, maintaining on task behaviour and developing skills and strategies, which enable us to transfer knowledge from one domain to another. Becoming more metacognitive is about slowing down and taking time to enjoy the thinking process, even to marvel at the ability we have to think about so many different things and to allow ourselves to follow our thoughts.

Time

Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

William Wordsworth,
“To a butterfly” (1801)

It seems a common experience that we remember our childhood days as being long and slow; there was lots of time to play and do the things we liked. Yet if you sit in any primary school classroom these days you will find a day governed by time. Teachers are under pressure to cover the content of the different curriculum areas; to ensure that the children in their class learn the skills necessary to progress in our highly literate and numerate culture; to ensure that children develop a sense of themselves as citizens of a wider world; to instruct children about healthy ways of living and the value of exercise; to provide opportunities for children to develop their social skills and to provide knowledge and awareness of spiritual matters or religious faiths. All of this has also to be differentiated for different ability levels, to take account of individual needs and to be accomplished efficiently and within time allocated slots. Teachers and support staff can be forgiven for thinking that trying to facilitate metacognitive development among all of this is not feasible – there just isn’t the time to do it.

Our schools and classrooms are microcosms of our world and the Western world is obsessed by time and efficiency. Adults are always busy. If they are not busy working, they are busy planning to go on holiday to get away from being busy.We pack so much into a week away, seeing sites, meeting new people, planning days out that it is not uncommon for us to come back from holiday and say that we need a holiday to recover from the holiday. This need to use time well and efficiently pervades our culture. In education, assessed outcomes can be the driver of how time is spent. It is not only children who are assessed on performance; teachers, schools and countries are also subjected to the same outcome led assessments in the form of national tests and league tables. The problem with facilitating the development of children’s metacognition is that it takes time and it has no obvious assessed outcome. It is difficult to measure progress and there may be nothing tangible to show for the work you have put in.

Metacognition is often seen as the reflective part of a teaching session. If practised at all, it is usually in the final section of a lesson, where children are asked to reflect on what they have learned; to verbalise how they solved the problem; to evaluate how difficult or easy they found the work and to think about how they might tackle such a problem in the future.The time constraints of the curriculum can mean that it is particularly difficult to fit this reflective element into a lesson. Furthermore children are often reluctant to engage in meaningful reflection when the playground beckons.

Asking young children to reflect on their thinking after the event, without any training in how to do this, is unlikely to produce a metacognitive experience. It is difficult for any of us to recall what we were thinking about some time ago. In the case of small children, the ability to verbalise thinking is also an issue.This latter point is linked to an important debate in metacognition theory, the need for metacognition to be conscious.

Consciousness

Whether metacognition is by definition a conscious act or whether some forms of automatic processing can also be deemed metacognition is an issue still debated by metacognition theorists. Automatic processing has been defined as fast, requiring little effort and control by the subject and operating at a level below consciousness. Theory suggests it takes two forms. One that is not age reliant and which does not require any cognitive effort and a secondary form where some conscious behaviours become automated over time, with age and with practice (Brown, 1987). This second form is problematic for theories of metacognition because a cognitive act which was once included in the metacognitive repertoire may become automated and unavailable to consciousness. A good example of this would be in learning to read, where a good deal of conscious effort is initially employed in linking sounds together and understanding the connection between written symbols and sound. However, as this process becomes more automatic, there is less need for conscious reflection or conscious monitoring of the reading process, unless the reader hits a problem word. Then the reader has to stop or slow down and make a conscious decision on whether to re-read, use a dictionary or bypass the difficulty. So the cognitive skill of reading is subject to metacognitive monitoring but theorists differ in the extent to which they include this unconscious monitoring within metacognitive theories.

Automatic processing is unavailable to consciousness and so it cannot be voluntarily controlled. This is obviously beneficial, since we would get nowhere if we had to be consciously aware of all of our thinking, all of the time. Fast, automatic processing frees up working memory capacity as information is processed more quickly and transferred to long term memory, for future conscious retrieval. A slower processing of initial information, it has been argued, clogs up the system and information is lost before it ever reaches storage (Anderson, 1989, 1992). Some theorists suggest that metacognition can include processing which is “available to consciousness” rather than wholly conscious (Baker, 1994; Veenman et al., 2002), however it is unclear what this would mean. Thoughts are either conscious or not; the fact that we can reflect on our thinking and perhaps bring automated cognition back into consciousness is not the same as being consciously aware of our thinking as it proceeds.

When we reflect, we are engaging our memory and our attempts to remember how we thought about something are likely to be an interpretation of what we actually thought at the time. I would argue that in order to develop metacognition, we must become aware of our thinking as it goes on, rather than relying on reflecting on our thinking after the event. Thus for me, metacognition has to be about conscious thinking about thinking, conscious monitoring and control of our thinking. It may be that when these cognitive skills are practised over time and in many different situations, aspects of metacognition may become automated, but in working with children or students with little or no apparent metacognitive processing, there is a need to be explicit and to model conscious metacognitive behaviour. It is certainly true that people may make decisions and reach conclusions about people or events unconsciously. However, if we are to take onboard Flavell’s call for metacognition to help us to make “wise and thoughtful life decisions” it is necessary for us to be more conscious of how we are making decisions or reaching conclusions. This may not alter our decision but in becoming aware of how we came to make the decision we may learn something about ourselves and our decision making skills, which may benefit us in the future.

Language

In order to model metacognition we need a language which involves what are called mental state words, e.g. “know”, “think”, “believe”, “guess”, “remember”. A good deal of research with children about their understanding of different mental state words has concluded that young children are not consistent in their use of these words and that understanding of them is a long process which continues throughout childhood. An important study by Wellman and Johnson (1979) investigated children’s understanding of “remember” and “forget”. They report that previous research suggests that “remember” is one of the earliest mental state verbs that children use. In their study, children of 3, 4, 5 and 7 years old were told short stories about a child character, an object and two hiding places for the object.The child was then asked a series of questions about the character in the story, including why he had looked in a specific place for the object and whether or not he had remembered where the object was. The researchers varied the stories so that in some, the character had no previous knowledge of where the object was, so could not remember or forget its location, only guess. This enabled the investigators to find out whether the children in their study actually understood the words or were just differentiating the words depending on whether the object was found or not. The results showed the words were first differentiated by the 4-year-olds but their use of the words was dependent on whether the object was found or not and not on whether the character had previous knowledge of where the object was. Only the 5 and 7-year-olds understood the link with previous knowledge and this understanding was more advanced for “remember” than for “forget”. Wellman and Johnson conclude that understanding of these mental state verbs is a progression from relying on performance to make the distinction to an understanding of the cognitive states that the verbs relate to. More recent work by Lockl and Schneider has confirmed the developmental trajectory of understanding mental state words but has also concluded that while comprehension of mental state words is necessary for the development of understanding cognitive states, development of knowledge about cognition, specifically about memory, can also aid understanding of mental state verbs (Lockl & Schneider, 2006).

Studies such as these have important implications for helping children to develop metacognition. Developing children’s understanding of the mental state words is important for developing metacognition, but this does not mean that we should restrict facilitating metacognitive development until this linguistic understanding has developed. Instead, use of different modes of communication such as visual and aural stimuli can be used to develop understanding of cognitive states and mental state words. I will return to these ideas in Part III.

Models and theories of metacognition

Arguably the most important theory of metacognition to date is Flavell’s original conceptualisation. Growing out of his work on memory; the Piagetian legacy of the link between memory and intelligence (Piaget et al., 1968); the work of Brown (1978); and studies such as Markman’s on comprehension monitoring (1977), Flavell developed a model of metacognition which includes: metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, goals (or tasks), and actions (or strategies) (Flavell, 1971, 1979).

Metacognitive knowledge is described as the stored knowledge about one’s own cognitive states, about others’ cognitive states or about the nature of cognition in general. Metacognitive knowledge also refers to an understanding of how different factors may interact to influence our own thinking. The Flavell model categorises these different factors into person, task and strategy groups. In the person group is our knowledge of ourselves and others as thinking beings, including that people think differently; that different people have different beliefs about thinking; that different people may be better at some tasks than others; and an understanding of how cognitive processes such as attention, concentration and remembering affect performance. The person category of metacognitive knowledge interacts and is linked with the task category.

The task category includes our knowledge about the task, e.g. is it similar to any other task we have done? do we have all the information we need about the task? and, given this knowledge, can we reliably predict our success or failure on the task? The strategy category of metacognitive knowledge includes knowledge about which strategies are useful to achieve our goals. A distinction is made between cognitive strategies which are directly related to doing the task itself and metacognitive strategies which are geared towards monitoring progress on the task and providing new strategies or new ways of thinking about the task in order to make progress. Flavell gives the example of studying for an exam, where you may monitor your progress by testing yourself; this he says is a metacognitive strategy aimed at assessing your own knowledge and monitoring your learning, but it may lead to a cognitive strategy of writing your revision notes in a different way. It can be difficult in real situations to differentiate between these two kinds of strategy use and it is clear from Flavell’s model that all the categories are linked and interact with each other. It is this metacognitive knowledge which we can consciously retrieve from memory in order to perform a cognitive task. However, Flavell also acknowledges that this metacognitive knowledge which we build up over time, through experience and practice on different tasks, can also unconsciously affect cognition.

Flavell describes how the metacognitive knowledge base is developed from experience, in particular through metacognitive experiences.These may be conscious and arise from already stored metacognitive knowledge, e.g. remembering a strategy you used to solve a similar problem or they may be more emotional, for instance a feeling that you are stuck on a part of the problem. In order for these metacognitive experiences to be fruitful in developing the metacognitive knowledge base they must be worked through and not shied away from as too time consuming or too psychologically difficult. Only by providing children with opportunities to practise working through metacognitive experiences are they likely to develop a sound metacognitive knowledge base. Luckily, Flavell (1979, p. 908) described for us the conditions under which metacognitive experiences are most likely to occur

in situations that stimulate a lot of careful, highly conscious thinking: in a job or school task that expressly demands that kind of thinking; in novel roles or situations, where every major step you take requires planning beforehand and evaluation afterwards, where decisions and actions are at once weighty and risky; where high affective arousal or other inhibitors of reflective thinking are absent.

While Flavell’s work provided the basis for the theory of metacognition, the 1980s and 1990s saw a burgeoning of research on different aspects of metacognition and a development of more detailed theoretical models. Kluwe’s work in the early 1980s was important in stressing self agency and executive control, i.e. that our thinking is under our own control (Kluwe, 1987). Borkowski’s work throughout the 1990s showed how metacognitive knowledge could impact on motivation and self esteem. His detailed model defined the characteristics of successful learners and linked metacognition to self regulated learning. It describes how a child might first develop knowledge of learning strategies and through practice in multiple settings learn when and how to best use these strategies. Then the child begins to understand the link between the use of the strategies and successful outcomes and this begins to build their metacognitive knowledge of themselves as a learner. The model includes self beliefs, self worth and knowledge of possible selves as well as personal motivational states. Borkowski shows a reciprocal relationship between the use of strategies and a sense of self efficacy; thus making an important link between strategies, which can be taught, successful learning and self esteem (Borkowski, 1996).

Metacognition has also been included in larger theories of intelligence. In particular Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence describes three basic components of intelligent systems: metacomponents, performance components and knowledge and acquisition components (Sternberg, 1985). While the performance components execute the plans of the metacomponents, the metacomponents also feed back information, i.e. provide the monitoring and control function of the system and make decisions on the use of strategies to achieve success. In doing this, the metacomponents are also acquiring information about what works for particular tasks and this can be stored in memory for future use. Thus metaco...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Metacognition in Children and Adults
• Part II: Metacognition across Subject Domains
• Part III: Facilitating Metacognition
• Part IV: New Thinking
• References