METACOGNITION
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.
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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