Metacognition

The new buzz-word in education (not that new, of course) is metacognition. There are many definitions of the term, but the most common is thinking about thinking. One of the sources I read the other day suggested that you really need a metaphor to understand or explain metacognition, and they suggested "the controls for your brain", like the controls for a car. Not bad, but I thought of one last night that I like better.

Have you ever been in or watched a 5k race? I used to run in them in my younger days. I was never in the elite group, or even very close, but they were fun community events. The most popular race in my area is held in the summer, right downtown, in a festival atmosphere. There are easily more than 1,000 runners of all ages. As an earnest, if not accomplished runner I was often annoyed by the kids who ran the race. They usually started out or raced to the front of the pack and took off sprinting when the gun sounded. They would run laterally, sometimes chasing each other, and always at top speed. Of course 4 or 5 blocks later they were spent and would stop suddenly, or veer off to the sidewalk. Really a menace. And of course I never saw them at the finish.

At the other end of the spectrum were the truly serious runners, and then the runners like me. For the serious runners, the ones in contention to win outright, a 5k is still not a sprint. I certainly did not sprint during a race. Why? Pacing. Pacing means that I knew that in order to finish, and to run the fastest race I could, I had to set the right pace. Too fast and I would fizzle out, too slow my time would suffer. Pacing was the key. I never got good enough to consider race tactics, but if you were good enough you would consider if you liked to set the pace, or wait for a strong kick. Perhaps the course is important, or the weather. Diet, pre-race routine, etc.

Pacing, tactics, conditions, all of these things are outside of or removed from the actual skill of running. This is what metacognition is to learning. Learning is interacting with the material you are trying to learn; encoding it, storing it, retrieving it, using it. Metacognition is thinking about the best way to do those things. It's both the principles of learning, and your own tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. We now know much from cognitive science about the better and worse ways of storing information so that it can be retrieved later. And skill acquisition. I'm reading make it stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, and they point out many ways that our intuitions about learning are both wrong and misleadingly satisfying. Worth a read.

Just like some people have genetic advantages to running, some people learn better than others. But everyone can benefit from considering their metacognitive practices and abilities, just like all runners need to consider pacing and tactics to perform their best.

There are ways to infuse metacognition into assignments and curricula. We can teach our students about metacognition, and we can create activities that require that they think about their thinking.

The attractive thing about metacognition is that it can be transferred from one setting, or one discipline, to others. There is some debate (and some research) about this, but it looks promising. It now seems painfully clear that our students will forget much of the content of our classes soon after they walk out of our classes, perhaps as soon as they finish an exam. But if we can teach them about metacognition they might be able to learn better in every setting they encounter. I used to think that the key to making life-long learners was to get someone hooked on the content. But maybe the key is to create better learners, so that learning is more successful, and thus more rewarding. We'll see.