1. Math/Science Partnerships Workshop NRC/NSRC March 8, 2004
Metacognition --How Students Reflect on Their Learning-- Michael E. Martinez University of California, Irvine
Math/Science Partnerships Workshop
NRC/NSRC
March 8, 2004
It is my pleasure to introduce some ideas on one topic in learning theory that ranks among the most important. The discovery of metacognition, and its theoretical elaboration, is a major breakthrough in recent decades of cognitive research.
My goals are, first, to clarify the concept of metacognition and, second to present some ideas about how metacognition can be taught. In addition to presenting these ideas, I hope to enter into discussion with you to advance our collective understanding of the interesting and important construct of metacognition.

2. Defining Metacognition
Possible Definitions
Most simply: Thinking about thinking
More exactly: The monitoring and control of thought
Areas of Application
Metamemory and comprehension
Problem solving
Critical thinking
It is best to begin with definitions. But with a concept as complex as metacognition, it is best to make our initial definition provisional--a point of departure--recognizing that our definition will become more detailed and complete as our understanding grows.
What is metacognition? Many teachers would say, quite acceptably, “thinking about thinking.” I would propose a more precise definition: The monitoring and control of thought. In monitoring and controlling thought one could ask, for example, “Do I understand? If not, maybe I should re-read or ask a question.”
The Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittenstein, had this to say about language:
Think of the tools in a tool box: There is a hammer pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a gluepot, glue, nails, and screws. The functions of word are as diverse as the functions of these objects.
We could make a parallel statement about metacognition: The applications of metacognition are as diverse as the uses of tools in a toolbox.
I have tried to identify three major categories of expression: metamemory and comprehension (considered together); problem solving; and critical thinking. I do not believe that this simple taxonomy exhausts the many types of thinking in which metacognition plays a role, but it does communicate its role in cognitive endeavors that have obvious importance.

3. Metamemory and Comprehension
Both Concern Awareness of One’s Own Knowledge State
Metamemory: How Accurately a Learner Can Appraise His or Her Own Knowledge State
Comprehension: How Accurately a Learner Can Appraise His or Her Understanding of Any Message, Written or Spoken
I’ve grouped metamemory and comprehension together because both refer to an understanding of one’s own knowledge. To illustrate metamemory I will ask: Are you able to name the nine planets of our solar system in order of distance from the sun?
Now either you can or you can’t do so. But your answer might be yes or no in either case. That is, independent of what you know, you can be accurate or inaccurate about your appraisal of your own knowledge. Is this accuracy important?
Research has shown repeatedly that an important quality of the learner isthe ability to be accurate in the appraisal about his or her knowledge. This self-insight has great predictive power for subsequent learning (Tobias and Everson, XXXX).
Metacognition about comprehension is similar. Just as with knowledge, comprehension during reading or listening can be good or poor. But independent of this is whether a reader realizes that his comprehension is good or poor. This appraisal can be very inaccurate. You can easily imagine a student reading a textbook page and not understanding it--and moreover not realizing that he does not understand. Both serious and common is a particular kind of error: Believing that one understands when one does not. Similar to this sad state is a more serious situation--not even considering whether one comprehends but simply taking notes or reading mechanically.

4. Problem Solving A Major Category of Human Cognition
What is Problem Solving?
The pursuit of a goal when the path to that goal is uncertain
Closely Linked to Scientific Thinking
Problem Solving Involves Metacognition at Each Step.
What am I trying to accomplish?
What are the most promising pathways?
Is my strategy working?
Problem solving is a huge category of cognitive activity. It is almost exclusively a human characteristic. It is exercised daily, often continuously, especially in a complex society.
Problem solving can be defined simply: It is the pursuit of a goal when the path to that goal is uncertain. Alternatively--and put in more folksy terms--it’s what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Scientific research is a form of problem solving; so is teaching. This is true because neither enterprise is algorithmic. Both involve continuous generation of possibilities, weighing those options, pursuing a subset of options, and evaluating the results. It is the image of finding your way through a maze, to use the metaphor of Herbert Simon. Metacognition involves the recurrent posing of questions. It is metacognition in that the plan is the cognition. But more is required: stepping back to constantly appraise and rework that plan by asking such questions as:
What am I trying to accomplish?
What are the most promising pathways?
Is my strategy working?

5. Critical Thinking Yet Another Major Category of Cognition
What is Critical Thinking?
The evaluation of ideas for their quality, especially in judging whether they make sense
Critical Thinking Involves Metacognition at Each Step.
Is the idea clear?
Does one idea follow from another?
Are the ideas backed by evidence?
Like problem solving, critical thinking embraces a lot of what human beings do--or at least potentially do. I find it helpful to separate problem solving from critical thinking, and I see the two as complementary.
Critical thinking may be a little harder to define crisply, but here is a first approximation:
Critical thinking is the evaluation of ideas for their quality, especially in judging whether or not they make sense.
Like problem solving, critical thinking is a constant feature of STEM-related cognition.
There are many standards we might apply metacognitively in thinking critically. For example, we can ask: Are the ideas clear, or are they ambiguous, vague, fuzzy?
Does one idea follow from another? Is the presentation logical, rational, coherent? Or does the argument contradict itself or make unwarranted inferences or unsupportable generalizations?
Are the claims backed by evidence, such as by trustworthy data and an analysis that is convincing and that conforms to standards of inquiry (e.g., judging probability of sampling error, establishing a control group, standardizing procedures, using reliable measurement).
In fact, the methods of inquiry in science and nonscience domains might be viewed as specialized tools to sharpen a more basic and general orientation to critical thinking.

6. Is Metacognition Content-Specific?
Content-Specific Metacognition
What phenomena am I trying to predict or explain?
How can possible explanations be compared and tested?
Content-General Metacognition
Is my strategy working?
Does this seem true to me?
On the question of whether metacognitive skill can be content general, there are differences of opinion. Many researcher stress that the power of metacognitive skills is content-bound. This is evident, for example, in such NRC reports as Learning and Understanding (p. 123).
It is an easy case to make that many important metacognitive processes are content-focused. For example, these questions (and others you could easily generate) could be applied routinely by scientists. Jointly, we might see these metacognitive operations and standards as constituting the scientific method.
I don’t think it is true, though, that all important metacognitive functions are content-bound. the generality of some functions is stated plainly by Ann Brown (HPL co-chair) in seminal 1978 article, p. 80.
The skills of metacognition do appear to have recognizable counterparts in”real-world, everyday-life” situations. Checking the results of an operation against certain criteria of effectiveness, economy, and common sense reality is a metacognitive skill applicable whether the task under consideration is solving a math problem, memorizing a prose passage, following a recipe, or assembling an automobile. Self-interrogation concerning the state of one’s own knowledge during problem solving is an essential skill in a wide variety of situations, those of the laboratory, the school, or everyday life.

7. Conscious or Automatic?
Initial definitions of metacognition presented it as a conscious process
Higher-level thought is known to rely on the automation of lower-level skills
Reason: Limited capacity of working memory
Higher-order thinking and automated skills are complementary
Could metacogntion have some component of automaticity?
It is common to present metacognition as a conscious and deliberate mental activity. We become more aware, for example, that we don’t understand a paragraph we read or a statement we heard.
But in cognition more generally, we can appreciate the complementarity of conscious processes and automated processes. Reading for comprehension relies, for example, on fluent decoding skills.
Automaticity aides, and is essential to, higher-order thought. Why do these work together rather than compete with each other? They do so because of what is described as the limited capacity of working memory.
WM and LTM
If working memory is “filled” with the processing of content--say decoding a text or taking notes from a lecture--there will be insufficient “room” in WM to ask: Do I understand what I just read or heard? Every complex mental task blends automated skills with critical, creative, and intelligent cognition.
However, if reading skill and note-taking skills are fluent, then their load to WM is decreased and there is capacity left over for the monitoring functions of metacognition.
I want to propose that metacognition can sometimes have the quality of automaticity. This became clear to me when a student noted a contradiction in what I said. Her hand went up--without any prior conscious thought she said. Perhaps this is what we mean when we imagine a reflective person who has developed critical habits of mind.

8. Related Ideas Wisdom (Socrates) Mindfulness (Ellen Langer)
Thinking Dispositions (David Perkins)
Habits of Mind (Mortimer Adler)
Evaluation (Benjamin Bloom)
Reflective Thinking (John Dewey)
Such metacognition as a mental habit acquiring the status of personality trait might well be what we are discussing here. Our recognition of metacognition as an important category of thought has been recognized in part because by other names for a long, long time. In fact, we might even trace it back as far a Socrates and the Socratic method of instruction.
We are familiar with Socratic dialogue as a method of instruction. A teacher poses questions and a student responds. But what was the point of those questions for Socrates? It was to discover the extent to which the teacher, Socrates, and his pupil did not understand. This self-insight--metamemory if you will--was for Socrates a key aspect of wisdom. Folly was the metacognitive error of believing one understands but does not.
“Illusion of knowing.” College students rated their comprehension as high despite the presence of contradictory sentences in a text.
There are also dispositions, habits of mind
Is it unreasonable that students learn to accept not understanding, rather than being troubled by it enough to correct the lack, if possible?

9. Vygotskian Connections
The Social Origins of Higher-Order Cognition
Higher-order thought processes begin as social discourse
Social discourse is internalized for the individual, as internal speech
Vygotsky’s Theory is Perhaps the Best Rationale for Group Processes in Learning.
Bearing in mind the pinnacle of Bloom’s Taxonomy, metacognition as evaluation turned inward.
In fact, this characterization is very compatible with the ideas of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky is well known for his idea of the zone of proximal development, but also the very important principle of internalization of higher-order thought. What Vygotsky taught is that higher-order thinking begins as social discourse, and these are internalized over time and experience. We can imagine, for example, a debate between two people about a prudent course of action. We should do this because. . . no we shouldn’t because. Now this kind of polemic, we all know, can go on inside our own heads, and probably we benefit from the ability to do this.
I think this is what people mean when they say that all learning is social and that they want student to cooperate. It is probably based on a vaguely realized sense that higher-order thought is cultivated first by experiencing it and esp. participating in it in a social setting. Note, however, that the quality of the social experience has to be high.

10. The Social Milieu Apprenticeship Science Lab Groups Graduate Study
Crafts, skilled trades, the arts
Professional training (e.g., medicine)
Science Lab Groups
Graduate Study
Could Vygotsky’s Theory Be Used More Deliberately?
I have suggested that the idea of metacognition is implicit in many conceptions of the educated mind going back as far as Socrates. It resonates with many intuitions. But calling it metacognition and trying to be explicit and precise is potentially a great boon to education.
Now just as the idea of metacognition has been understood implicitly, so it has been practices implicitly for centuries and millennia in the crafts and trades. More recently with professionalism, apprenticeship has provided the social environment for the acquisition of patterns and standards of reasoning.
In science laboratory groups, there may be differences in the metacognitive criteria applied to data. For example, an anomolous result in a control group might be ignored as error in one lab group, but to another it signals the possibility of a discovery (Dunbar).

11. How to Enhance Metacognition
Credible Presence in the Curriculum
Explicit goals
Instruction
Assessment
Modeling by Teacher/Professor
Social Interaction Among Learners
Potentially very effective
Difficult to sustain quality
This leads to the all-important question of how metacognition can be exercised in the classroom, whether elementary, secondary, undergraduate, or graduate.
A first requirement is that be placed in situations that demand metacognition. These must ahve a credible and enduring presence in stated goals and in the established curriculum, including assessment. The development of metacognition ought to be an explicit goal.
Second, and this connects to Vygotsky and to Ann Brown, metacognition can be modeled. Thinking aloud, particularly during problem solving, can be a powerful source of cognitions that can be internalized.
Third is the use of social interaction.

12. Emotional and Self-Regulatory Aspects
Metacognition is Not Only Cognitive
Non-Cognitive Aspects
Affective (emotion)
Conative (motivation/volition)
Self-referent beliefs (self-efficacy)
I do not want to leave the topic of metacognition having stressed only coolly rational elements.
Also deeply implicated are emotional and self-regulatory considerations. That is, metacognition is not just cognitive in the sense of “cool” (non-emotional) considerations. Motivation and volition (or self-regulation) also play important roles.
Because metacognition is especially required in demanding situations, it requires the management of negative emotions that often accompany uncertainty, mistakes, the possibility of failure, and difficulty. Metacognition might also involve learning positive emotions associated with accomplishment, focus, overcoming obstacles, and the possibility of creative solutions.
On the self-regulatory sides, persistence in the face of difficulty can be crucial. Also adaptive are belief systems that emphasize the role of effort (rather than fixed ability) that is sustained over time.

13. Metacognition and Education
Part and parcel of what it means to be scientifically literate
Crucial to advanced study in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology
Part of what it means to be an educated person
Crucial tools for personal effectiveness in a world that is rich in both information and uncertainty
To summarize, metacognitive ability is central to both STEM accomplishment and to conceptions of what it means to be educated.
Especially as the world becomes more complex, more information-rich, more full of options, more demanding of fresh approaches, the importance of metacognition as an educational outcome will rise concomitantly. How much better it would be if this were forefront in our minds, goals, plans, and methods as educators.