Tuesday 14 February 2017

Metacognition

METACOGNITION


Introduction
In general, Metacognition is thinking about thinking. More specifically, Taylor (1999) defines Metacognition as “an appreciation of what one already knows, together with a correct apprehension of the learning task and what knowledge and skills it requires, combined with the ability to make correct inferences about how to apply one’s strategic knowledge to a particular situation, and to do so efficiently and reliably.”
The more students are aware of their thinking processes as they learn, the more they can control such matters as goals, dispositions, and attention. Self-awareness promotes self-regulation. If students are aware of how committed (or uncommitted) they are to reaching goals, of how strong (or weak) is their disposition to persist, and of how focused (or wandering) is their attention to a thinking or writing task, they can regulate their commitment, disposition, and attention. For example, if students were aware of a lack of commitment to writing a long research assignment, noticed that they were procrastinating, and were aware that they were distracted by more appealing ways to spend their time, they could then take action to get started on the assignment. But until they are aware of their procrastination and take control by making a plan for doing the assignment, they will blissfully continue to neglect the assignment.
Metacognition and Three Types of Knowledge 
To increase their metacognitive abilities, students need to possess and be aware of three kinds of content knowledge: declarative, procedural, and conditional. Declarative knowledge is the factual information that one knows; it can be declared spoken or written. An example is know the formula for calculating momentum in a physics class (momentum = mass times+ velocity). Procedural knowledge is knowledge of how to do something, of how to perform the steps in a process; for example, knowing the mass of an object and its rate of speed and how to do the calculation. Conditional knowledge is knowledge about when to use a procedure, skill, or strategy and when not to use it; why a procedure works and under what conditions; and why one procedure is better than another. For example, students need to recognize that an exam word problem requires the calculation of momentum as part of its solution.
This notion of three kinds of knowledge applies to learning strategies as well as course content. When they study, students need the declarative knowledge that (1) all reading assignments are not alike; for example, which a history textbook chapter with factual information differs from a primary historical document, which is different from an article interpreting or analyzing that document. They need to know that stories and novels differ from arguments. Furthermore they need to know that there are different kinds of note taking strategies useful for annotating these different types of texts. And (2) students need to know how to actually write different kinds of notes (procedural knowledge), and (3) they need to know when to apply these kinds of notes when they study (conditional knowledge). Knowledge of study strategies is among the kinds of metacognitive knowledge, and it too requires awareness of all three kinds of knowledge.




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