Metacognition: This Is Why Students Are Failing And What You Can Do About It
By: John Von Neumann Ii
Tags: Future, Education, Learning, College, Psychology

“Actively self-reflecting on the approaches that you are taking fosters a strategic stance that is really important in life. Strategic thinking distinguishes between people of comparable ability and effort. This can make the difference between people who achieve and people who have the potential to achieve, but don’t.” — Patricia Chen.

Keywords and ideas

Inactive student → uses ineffective learning strategies; Active student → uses effective learning strategies; School-centered learning → students “isolate” themselves to teacher-given information and schoolbooks rather than also utilizing the internet → worsens learning; Student-centered learning → students know how set up goals, find information, learn that information, and know when something brings them further or closer to their set up goals → promotes student metacognition; Students comparing their time spent on each task → enhances student metacognition; Psychological safety → how safe people feel to show themselves and be authentic; Discussing anonymous questions in class → can raise psychological safety; Adding an external reward to a cognitive task → decreases task-performance; Low-stakes testing → improves learning; Intelligent novices → novices that have the ability to detect and correct their errors; Delayed feedback → can create intelligent novices; Explicit and implicit knowledge components → conscious and subconscious skills, respectively; Self-explanation effect → enhances learning and promotes the learning of explicit knowledge components; Metamemory → a component of metacognition, which means knowing how memory works and how to improve it → enhances learning; Metacognitive skills → are domain-general (rather than domain-specific).

Table of Content

Two Types of Students The Problem With Joe: The Illusion of Confidence Promoting Student Metacognition as a Teacher: The Right and Wrong Way How Does Student-Centered Learning Promote Student Metacognition? Add-Ons To Open Homework and Collaborative Lessons: Metacognitive Pre- and Post-Assessments Psychological Safety: Why Students are Afraid to Speak Up Promoting Psychological Safety in The Classroom The Problem With Being Performance-Oriented: Focusing Too Much on Grades Frequent Low-Stakes Quizzes and Testing to Enhance Learning and Student Metacognition Delayed Feedback to Enhance Student Metacognition: Creating Intelligent Novices Knowledge Component: Explicit and Implicit The Problem With Joe: Only Learning the Implicit Knowledge Component Promoting the Learning of Explicit Knowledge Components via The Self-Explanation Effect Enhance Learning via Usage and Development of Metamemory

Abstract

I n this article, I want to present how one as a teacher, student, or anyone else can apply metacognition to enhance learning. In order to see how powerful metacognition can be and to promote further reading of this article, I would suggest reading this source:

Imagine giving yourself or others a +30 IQ boost!

Again, this article is meant for everyone, not just teachers.

Two Types of Students

In the field of metacognition, you could somewhat say there are two types of students:

The “inactive” active student

Joe is the type of student who enters a classroom, types and notes everything down, makes pictures or saves any PowerPoint slide, and so on. Joe also makes sure to “highlight” everything in the textbook, which he believes enhances learning.

Once Joe returns home, he reviews and rereads everything he typed and noted down, watches the same pictures and PowerPoint slides again. Once he is done, he considers himself having “learned” the material.

To make truly sure he has “learned” the material, he does the process all over again before sleeping. “Now I just need to sleep well and everything will go alright” Joe says before falling asleep.

The active student

Einstein is the type of student who enters the classroom, types and note everything down, makes pictures or saves any PowerPoint slide, and so on.

Once Einstein returns home, he applies what is called free recall before reviewing everything he has saved from the lesson. He writes down what he was able to remember with free recall and compares it with his notes from the classroom.

Einstein tries to “attack” the material from all kinds of directions through asking questions such as:

“Why did I thought that?”

“How does that differ from what the textbook says?”

“Does this material remind me of anything I already know?”

And so on…

Once having done this, he notes down all his ideas in a system (e.g. Quizlet) helping him apply spaced repetition in the form of a question or cloze deletion.

Before sleeping, Einstein grabs the questions and tries to answer them, while comparing the answers in a delayed feedback manner. Once finished, he tries to apply free recall once more before sleeping.

(There are many more ways to “actively learn” and I would suggest reading this article):

Exam

So who do you think will perform better on the exam? Joe or Einstein (regardless of their names)?

Probably Einstein.

It will all makes sense further in this article…

So, how can one as a teacher, student, or anyone else promote student metacognition i.e. the active student?

The Problem With Joe: The Illusion of Confidence

According to this research paper: Neural correlates of metacognitive ability and of feeling confident: a large-scale fMRI study, there exists a negative correlation between feelings of confidence on one’s task-performance and metacognitive abilities. That is, the more confident one feels about one’s task-performance, the less developed a person’s metacognitive abilities are.

Looking back at our example with Joe, we can clearly see how he was overconfident in his own comprehension and learning.

Here’s a video explaining how being underconfident can be beneficial:

So how can we help Joe?

Promoting Student Metacognition As a Teacher

Student-centered learning

One way to promote student metacognition and enhance learning, is through student-centered learning. So first of all, what is student-centered learning?

I prefer to explain it by defining its exact opposite first: teacher or school-centered learning.

School-centered learning: the WRONG way

School-centered learning means that students rely almost completely on the information they receive from their teachers and given textbooks.

They do not try to utilize the internet to find more information explaining the same concepts but from a different perspective. This is an example of what is called a limiting factor.

Simply put, rereading the same textbook over and over again until you understand the things is less efficient than trying to see the same concepts from a different perspective e.g. on the internet.

Student-centered learning: the RIGHT way

From Wikipedia:

Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving.

This includes teaching the students how to seek information independently, that is, information other than received from the teacher or a textbook.

Learning is a very individual thing, some people like to read a textbook while others prefer watching a documentary on YouTube (although doing both is usually the most effective, see E-learning (theory) on Wikipedia).

So how can one promote student-centered learning?

One way is to give “open” homework e.g. saying “I want you to pick one source, either from Wikipedia, YouTube, or anything else related to this subject for next week, and I want you to explain what you have learned.”

In order to also make your students read the textbook, you could add “…And it has to be unique and different from what is stated in the textbook”.

How Does Student-Centered Learning Promote Student Metacognition?

First of all, we have to define some terms:

Metacognitive knowledge means knowledge about oneself and how cognition works; Metacognitive regulation means regulation of one’s cognition in order to control learning; Metacognitive experiences means knowledge of when one’s own thinking works or doesn’t work

By freely browsing the internet, watching YouTube documentaries, etc. students slowly get to know what makes them learn more efficiently and what not. One can see how this applies to metacognitive knowledge and experiences, but what about regulation?

One way to ensure that students become aware of how much time they spend on learning things when giving them “open” homework, is by simply telling them that they have to note down how much time they spent on each task e.g. 15 minutes of Googling to find a source such as Wikipedia, 10 minutes of reading, 30 minutes of understanding, and so on.

This way, students become more aware whether they are spending their time efficiently or not. In order to amplify this awareness even more, one can give them tasks where they have to collaborate and explain what they have found and learned to other students.

Through collaboration, they might learn how someone only spent 10 minutes of understanding yet learned way more than they did. Maybe that person read a much simpler source such as the ELI5 subreddit, or maybe that person utilized multiple sources rather than just one.

Further, this image shows the many benefits of collaborative lessons:

By Jeffrey Anderson — http://www.edutechie.ws/2007/10/09/cone-of-experience-media/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37711912

Metacognitive regulation can be further broken down into three simple components:

Planning → “Where and how do I find information for my homework?” Monitoring → “How efficiently am I finding information” or “How well am I understanding this information?” Evaluating → “What is the quality of my final product? And how efficiently did I produce it (in comparison to other students)?”

One can see, again, how collaboration and explaining it to other students allows one to “evaluate” better. In fact, there’s almost no way to know how well you are learning without comparing yourself to others!

Lastly, by making the students compare the time they have spent on each task to each other, this further enhances awareness and student metacognition.

Add-Ons To Open Homework and Collaborative Lessons: Metacognitive Pre- and Post-Assessments

Pre-assessment essentially means that, before you discuss and teach the lesson, you first ask them “What do you already know about this subject?”

What does that achieve? It allows for what is called semantic learning i.e. making new neural connections with already existing neural connections. This, in turn, allows for what is called robust learning.

Robust learning, according to LearnLab, Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center consists of three main components:

Long-term retention: It is retained for long periods of time, at least for days and even for years. Transfer: It transfers, that is, it can be used in situations that differ significantly from the situations present during instruction. Accelerated future learning: It accelerates future learning. That is, when related instruction is presented in the future, the acquired knowledge allows students to learn more quickly and/or more effectively.

One can see how, again, asking the question “What do you already know about this subject?” satisfies the three main components of robust learning.

Metacognitive post-assessment means that you are asking questions such as “Have any ideas and beliefs changed during this lesson?”

What does this achieve? Let’s repeat the definition of metacognition again.

From Metacognition, Wikipedia:

Metacognition is “cognition about cognition”, “thinking about thinking”, “knowing about knowing”, becoming “aware of one’s awareness” and higher-order thinking skills.

By making the students aware of how their thoughts and beliefs are changing and also why they did change, they are becoming more aware of “thinking about thinking” i.e. metacognition.

I will refer you to: Promoting Student Metacognition by CBE — Life Sciences Education for more in-depth information about metacognitive pre- and post-assessments, as well as more possible questions and examples to ask during these phases.

Again, collaborative lessons can speed up and enhance this process.

Psychological Safety: Why Students Are Afraid To Speak Up

The problem one can experience as a teacher or student, is that students may not exhibit honesty when collaborating and discussing with other students, such as when comparing each other’s time spent on each task e.g. saying you only spent 10 minutes when, in fact, it took you 20 minutes.

This, in turn, leads to worse metacognitive improvements during and after class. During class, because they experience stress and after class, because their self-image is inflated when learning new things (they keep reminding themselves that other students do the same things in less time).

Why do students do this? Because students don’t want to look “bad”, and it can cause discomfort in some students to know that someone made a better assignment with less time and effort.

From Wikipedia:

Psychological safety can be defined as “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career”.

Students, especially in their early years and young age, can especially be vulnerable to wanting to keep a “good self-image”.

So how can one promote psychological safety as a teacher or student themselves?

Promoting Psychological Safety In The Classroom

One way to promote psychological safety in the class from the students’ perspectives, is to now and then have them note down questions anonymously. These questions, in turn, will be addressed and discussed.

As a teacher, you can try to add words such as “That’s an interesting question”.

Oftentimes, a lot more students experience the same kind of problems revolving around the same question. Depending on how the discussion progresses, the one who asked the question will slowly feel more at ease. In fact, everyone who also experiences problems around the same question will feel at ease, because they are now aware that they are not the only one with such questions and difficulties.

The Problem With Being Performance-Oriented: Focusing Too Much on Grades

Another thing that undermines students’ learning efficiency is being too performance-oriented i.e. focusing too much on grades.

Why does focusing too much on one’s grade result in worse learning? Because learning no longer becomes intrinsically rewarding.

According to Wikipedia:

Intrinsic motivation refers to initiating an activity for its own sake because it is interesting and satisfying in itself, as opposed to doing an activity to obtain an external goal (extrinsic motivation).

Essentially, research says that by adding an external reward, task-performance decreases. This, however, only accounts for cognitive tasks, and making homework and learning pretty much are cognitive tasks:

Lastly, tasks that are intrinsically rewarding usually give energy while tasks that don’t immediately (or within a short time) give their extrinsic reward take energy. One, then, can imagine how students try to minimize their energy output which, again, leads to worse performance. You can imagine this concept like how some people feel like they have more energy left than before going into the gym, while others feel like they have less energy left.

Now, it is of course not possible to remove the grade system even though, in my personal opinion, education focuses way too much on standardized testing.

We can, however, do something else to invoke intrinsic motivation and promote learning and student metacognition.

Frequent Low-Stakes Quizzes and Testing To Enhance Learning and Student Metacognition

According to Oswego, University of New York:

Student learning is enhanced by frequent practice, and this is most effective when the practice is distributed across time and across tasks.

Low-stakes simply means that there is no grade attached to whatever test you set up. The only thing students need to trade is their time and energy.

This, in turn, removes any extrinsic reward making room for intrinsic motivations.

Again, if psychological safety is high enough, students can compare how they learned for these low-stakes tests, how much time they spent, etc. to enhance student metacognition even further.

So, let’s say you or a student made an error, does it matter how quickly you try to correct yourself or the student? Yes it does!

Delayed Feedback To Enhance Student Metacognition: Creating Intelligent Novices

According to the research paper called Fostering the Intelligent Novice: Learning From Errors With Metacognitive Tutoring by LearnLab:

…immediate feedback can negatively impact learning in two ways: First, it could obscure important task cues — that is, learners may come to depend on feedback to assess progress on tasks instead of cues inherent in the natural task environment (metacognitive monitoring). Second, feedback could prevent important secondary skills from being exercised. Implicit in the guidance hypothesis is the idea that immediate feedback may promote the development of generative skills. Generative skills are skill components that are involved in selecting and implementing problem solving operators in specific task contexts. However, evaluative skills — skills called for in evaluating the effect of applying problem solving operators, correcting errors, and monitoring one’s own cognitive process — may go unpracticed (metacognitive evaluation).

So, what do we mean by “intelligent novices”? In short, intelligent novices are capable of detecting and correcting their errors. Let’s take a look again at our metacognitive components:

Metacognitive knowledge means knowledge about oneself and how cognition works; Metacognitive regulation means regulation of one’s cognition in order to control their learning; Metacognitive experiences means knowledge of when one’s own thinking works or doesn’t work

Again, we can see how intelligent novices satisfy all three metacognitive components:

The intelligent novice knows how cognition works (well enough) in order to detect and correct errors; They can regulate their cognition and take some time to reflect in order to allow themselves the time required to ask themselves questions such as “Have I done everything right?”; And they know whether their thinking works or doesn’t work i.e. applying the same way of thinking to an error would produce the same error.

Further, metacognitive regulation can be broken down into three components:

Planning → “Where and how do I find information for my homework?” Monitoring → “How efficiently am I finding information” or “How well am I understanding this information?” Evaluating → “What is the quality of my final product? And how efficiently did I produce it (in comparison to other students)?”

If we apply these to the intelligent novice we get:

Planning → “Where and how do I find information to seek and correct my potential errors?” Monitoring → “How confident am I about my task-performance?” and “How many errors have I already made?” Evaluating → “What is the quality of my final product?”

Simply said: When in doubt, choose delayed feedback.

Knowledge Component: Explicit and Implicit

So first of all, what do we mean by “knowledge component”? Simply said, the word “knowledge component” is synonymous with “mental models” or “principles”.

The concept of knowledge component can be further split into two branches: explicit and implicit knowledge component.

According to LearnLab, Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, their definitions can be explained as follows:

When we say a student “has” a knowledge component, it might mean the student can describe it in words (e.g., “Vertical angles are congruent”) or it might simply mean that the student behaves as described by the knowledge component, but may not be able to describe it themselves. In this second case, to say the student “has” the knowledge component “If angle A and B are vertical angles and angle A is X degrees, then angle B is X degrees” means the student will behave in accord with it even though they might not be able to state the rule. The first is an “explicit” knowledge component, like a fact or principle, and the second an “implicit” knowledge component, like a skill. Much of what first language learners know about their first language involves implicit knowledge components.

You can imagine an implicit knowledge component like knowing how to cycle (subconsciously) while an explicit knowledge component would be knowing what enables you to cycle (consciously) e.g. your muscles, brain, a bicycle, and so on.

The Problem With Joe: Only Learning The Implicit Knowledge Component

So, the problem with most students, is that they usually are pretty much satisfied when they are capable of solving, for example, a math problem. They don’t necessarily care what the names are of the techniques they used.

Now, the problem with such an approach, is that decreases robust learning. Why? Well, if you read the subchapter “Add-ons to open homework and collaborative lessons: metacognitive pre- and post-assessments”, in order to engage in metacognitive pre-assessment (either alone or in class), one has to be able to tell what techniques they know.

The only way for students who have only learned the “implicit knowledge component” to engage in metacognitive pre-assessment, would be to demonstrate it on a chalkboard, computer, or on paper. This, however, can be an arduous and slow task for the student himself (alone) and possibly others around him (in class).

One can imagine that, because it takes more time and energy to engage in metacognitive pre-assessment at all, they might become discouraged from doing so, both in class and alone. Again this, in turn, decreases robust learning.

So how can we promote students in trying to learn the explicit knowledge components?

Promoting The Learning of Explicit Knowledge Components via The Self-Explanation Effect

One way to promote the learning of explicit knowledge components, is by deliberately making students explain why they did something i.e. explaining their implicit knowledge component.

For more in-depth information about the self-explanation effect, see:

Excerpt from the article:

It is better to ask a student to see if they can explain something to themselves, than for a teacher or book to always explain it to them.

By making them more aware of the explicit knowledge components this, in turn, enables them to engage much easier in metacognitive pre-assessments (alone or in class) and, once again, promote robust learning.

Enhance Learning via Usage and Development of Metamemory

Metamemory, a component of metacognition, simply means the knowledge you possess of how your (or in general a human) memory works e.g. knowing the difference between short-term and long-term memory as well as knowing how to store things as long-term memories.

The problem with most students, is that they believe highlighting and rereading text causes short-term memories to become long-term memories. This is completely false, see this article:

Instead, the best way of learning is to apply strategies like spaced repetition. Programs like Anki, SuperMemo or Quizlet are excellent tools to help with creating and maintaining long-term memories.

It is, then, advisable as a student, teacher, or anyone else to teach this concept to anyone else, and of course themselves, to enhance learning.

Other ways to make more use and develop metamemory are using mnemonics and the method of loci.

See this interesting video about a memory champion called Dominic O’Brien:

Another interesting story showing how powerful a developed metamemory can be:

Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, graduated at the age of 22 with a first class degree in psychology and philosophy from Oxford University in 2004 and completing a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science at Paris Descartes University under the supervision of J. Kevin O’Regan in 2005. From: Ed Cooke (author), Wikipedia

Imagine that, following degrees at prestigious universities with pretty much ease thanks to a well-developed metamemory!

Are Metacognitive Skills Domain-Specific?

I want to end this article with the following excerpt from Wikipedia:

There is no distinction between domain-general and domain-specific metacognitive skills. This means that metacognitive skills are domain-general in nature and there are no specific skills for certain subject areas. The metacognitive skills that are used to review an essay are the same as those that are used to verify an answer to a math question.

Finally, look back at the stories describing how Joe and Einstein learn at the beginning of this article. What are they doing right and wrong?

If you like this article, you may also like this one:

And remember to subscribe for more articles like this: