 This week we turn to the very global, broad concept of metacognition, how each of us learns to learn, and the theories of how the brain learns that are connected with this. This is based on a lecture that we gave, which actually linked these concepts of metacognition and theory of mind through feedback. Feedback is key to learning. We need to have feedback in order to know what areas or what things need to be corrected. What's very interesting is if you look at this internal feedback is actually metacognition. It's thinking about thinking. It's thinking about how to be more efficient in your own thinking. And we can look at that through neuroimaging and we can also see this through measured improvement of metacognitive abilities. But external feedback is what can be expressed as theory of mind. So understanding the other actually helps you to understand yourself. So hearing from others, appreciating how others view your own actions actually helps you understand yourself better as well. So we're going to look at these things kind of as a pair. So let's start with the idea that feedback is key to learning. According to Bolish, Jannet and Fazir, there are two main avenues for learning about the self, looking inward as in introspection, metacognition, and looking outward, which is feedback. Both avenues have to be modeled or taught explicitly to be successful. So one thing that's very important to understand is that while your brain can't help but learn, you cannot reach levels of metacognition without explicitly working towards that goal. So if we look at this idea of metacognitive development as giving feedback to yourself, this means becoming more aware of yourself and how you actually think. So becoming more aware is not necessarily following a laundry list of procedures or this is how to think better in a metacognitive form. It's actually just becoming aware of thinking processes rather than a checklist. And the reason we say this is connected to explicit instruction is because it's actually helping students see or make thinking visible, see in themselves exactly how they think through different problems or different challenges. Cognition is the realm of thinking. Metacognition is the realm of thinking about thinking. Not thinking about the phenomenon of thought in general or the nature of knowledge in the philosophical sense, but reflecting on your own thinking process. If cognition is what happens in your mind while you're engaged in learning, metacognition is what happens in your mind when you're engaged in monitoring and managing your learning. Consider painting as self-portrait. There are two levels of activity. There's painting, the touch of the brush to the canvas. Then there's metapainting, the painter's awareness and regulation of the painting. As the metacognitive painter reflects on his work, he draws on his knowledge of painting in several ways. An awareness of what colors complement each other. An understanding of which brush strokes produce different effects. And the discernment of when to apply different techniques and use certain brushes to achieve the desired result. The reflective painter also manages his own painting as he goes along. He is mindful of how he plans to use the space of the canvas. He monitors his progress to make sure he is staying on track. And he evaluates his work constantly checking that the paint on the canvas reflects the image on his mind and in the mirror. Whether it's painting or the knowledge and skills of any other discipline, we want our students to not only be critical and creative thinkers, but also to become reflective about their learning. As students face an ever-increasing demand on their attention and an ever-broadening world available for consideration, an important part of helping them think for themselves is helping them think about their own thinking. So I'd like to ask you to reflect on this really quickly. You know, what is, you know, metacognitive practice? What do I already know? What do you know about metacognition? What are you aware of? What have you heard of, either in this lecture or before? And second, what's the difference between metacognition and deep thinking and higher-order thinking? Okay, so having a chance to quickly reflect on this. Is metacognition really the highest on the cognitive scale? We have different types of models, right? You have a modified bloom concept here. You have remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating. And the higher-order thinking here has to do with thinking about thinking. Being able to actually understand this entire process is a metacognitive structure, right? Or you could look at things based on maybe Marzano's work. Marzano considers metacognition one of five different aspects of actually thinking in general. So metacognition is related to content-area knowledge, understanding. It also has to do with critical and creative thinking, you know, innovating. Being able to use this core knowledge to build off of that and to do something that's slightly more elevated. It's related to but is not the same as general thinking processes, which have to do with concept formation, principle formation, comprehension, problem-solving, decision-making, research, composing, oral discourse. These are basic thinking processes, but that's not the same as metacognition. Metacognition would be thinking about these thinking processes. And it's also related to core thinking skills categories. So being able to focus information gathering, remembering, organizing, analyzing, generating, integrating, and evaluating. So basically Marzano is actually breaking apart even further Bloom's taxonomy that we found over here and saying that all of these different pieces are elements or dimensions of thinking. Metacognition then would be the ability to think of all these other four areas at the same time to understand how one thinks best. So there are activities that have been shown to stimulate metacognition and they fall into six basic categories. So there's activities that have to do with learning about yourself, knowledge about yourself as a learner, and the factors that affect your own cognition. There are also other activities that have to do with awareness and management of cognition in general, including strategies about how to plan, think, and investigate new work. Third, there's knowledge about why and when to use a different strategy. So once you have the strategies, not all strategies are good for all different types of learning. So part of metacognitive awareness is understanding which strategies work best for which kinds of thinking activities. Fourth is the identification and selection of appropriate strategies in the allocation of resources. So the energy that it takes to learn something based on the strategy that is chosen is really important. Some strategies require a lot of energy, but they get you smaller results. Other things require less energy and get you bigger results. Other things are even, but you have to choose the right strategy for the different thinking activity necessary and you have to be prepared to allocate the resources, your energy, towards doing that to improve metacognitive awareness. The fifth category of activities has to do with attending to and being aware of comprehension and task performance. So basically self-assessment. How did I do? Could I do that better? What did I do that could be improved upon next time? And the sixth category has to do with assessing the process and product for one's learning and revisiting and revising. So one of the things we can do in schools very easily or with our own children is basically helping activate prior knowledge. Letting them know or helping them assess what do you already know about the new learning that's going to take place and what gaps does that leave then? If you already know this, what are the pieces that you don't know? Or is this similar to anything that you've ever learned before? So this activating prior knowledge is incredibly important as a metacognitive strategy. An additional activity that's highly recommended has to do with habituated reflection. Always taking the time to see what you already know, what you don't know and how you filled in your gaps and was that efficient or not. So taking the time to reassess and reflect about your own thinking processes in its own time. Many times we have students yourselves, the students sometimes you just try to cram and get as much knowledge into your head as possible. But you don't take the downtime, step away from that and to think, okay, at the end of the day, was that the best way I could have approached this learning moment or are there other things I could have done differently? And it's important to remember that metacognitive activities, you know, don't... While they have to be taught explicitly, this does not mean that it takes extra time. You know, you have to set a whole class time apart to actually teach it. So it actually has to do with the choice of activities that you do and then the new habituated actions that you develop within that student so that they take the time to have habituated reflection on their own. One way to begin a metacognitive awareness is to begin with four simple questions. You know, what do I already know about this? What do I need to know? So this is sort of a gap analysis. What do I already know? What am I still missing, right? Then how can I fill in my gaps of knowledge and where do I start? Those four simple questions can be used in any... with any age group, with any subject matter, with any topic that you're exploring. But the idea is to come into this habituated mind frame where you're always looking at these kinds of questions as you approach challenges in your life. So some activities that stimulate metacognition enhance knowledge about cognition itself. You know, how does learning occur? Or they enhance monitoring of cognition. So there's two biggies there. So one way to look at this is if you plan and you set goals about things and then there's a strategy and you monitor that, you would evaluate this and then you adapt and you start all over again. A very concrete example of this. It comes from Carlton. And it basically looks at different types of strategies that can happen and then how you apply them, adapt and evaluate and modify new cognition. So in their work, they separate between low effort or class or activity level effort, like think per share, very easy to do, retrieval practice, what do you already know about something, right? To moderate level effort, which has to do with reflective prompts or exam wrappers or learning journals. To committed effort, things that take a lot more energy to do. When we talked about using resources, right? This takes a lot more energy to get people to do classroom notebooks to actually write and reflect on what they've done. But depending on the needs and depending on the strategies, depending on your overall goals that you had originally, this might be the best way possible. For example, in my son's class and an Ivy math class, the teacher had the students write reflective journals. And that journal actually helped the individual students realize what their own thinking processes were and how they were approaching the math problems. And over time, these types of journals were actually really, really helpful in helping students modify their own thinking about math problems. So depending on the level of effort, energy and resources and the needs that your students have based on your overall goals, you can choose different types of activities related to this. I say this from a teacher perspective, but each individual, you as an individual, as you learn, can use these activities in different ways to different levels of metacognitive awareness. So this leads us to a visibility question or a measurability question. Can you see metacognition? We talk about metacognition, we're thinking about thinking, which is actually really, really philosophical. We are the only creatures on earth that can actually think about how our brains are thinking about things, right? But is that tangible? Is that something we can look at? What does that look like in practice if you're looking for observable behavior? Well, one way you could do this has to do with observation rubrics of metacognition. This is from a fourth grade class based on Art Costa's work related to metacognition. And rubric could be something as simple as when they describe their own thinking, do they select the best ideas possible or they just write whatever comes to their head first? Do they give reasons for their responses that they choose? Do they articulate a plan of action? Do they plan, monitor and adjust? They can, they self-generate questions. So basically rubrics like this can be used to identify certain sub-elements or certain aspects of metacognition or metacognitive awareness. And they can be used to help students and grow in their metacognitive awareness. There are other strategies that are listed here. They come from page 166, and I have both that have to do with strategies for developing metacognitive behaviors that I encourage you to look at, especially those of you who are in teaching, but also for self-awareness. If you have as a goal metacognitive awareness, do you always go through this process of identifying what you know and what you don't know? Do you talk about thinking? One of the reasons we say that one of the best ways to learn is to teach is because the individual has to express to another person using vocabulary that the other person understands or using appropriate terminology to identify different concepts and terms. So this is something that we are that is often done in writing groups, for example. Cambridge University, Harvard, there's many different writing groups, for example. And what do the students do? They get together, they talk to each other for about five minutes. What is it that you're going to write about? So they try to articulate what they're going to do. Then they write intensely for 45 minutes an hour, and then they talk about what happened. So talking about thinking, talking about your writing processes, about how you are learning about the concepts actually helps you become more efficient in your thinking. Keeping a thinking journal, as I mentioned before, the example of keeping a journal in the math class, doesn't seem like writing things down in words would help you understand concepts in numbers, but it actually does. Because when you write down, well, I became really frustrated because I can never remember to put the negative sign for the parentheses. By actually articulating that to yourself in written form, you take it to another level of thinking. So being able to express something in a written form is a very different thing from letting things just ping-pong around in your head. Planning and self-regulation, did you actually, as we mentioned in the student who was preparing for a test, did you think about the best way to approach this particular test or problem? Did you plan on how you were going to divide up your time to be able to study for the different types of questions? So have you taken the time to do that? That's part of metacognition as well. Debriefing, the thinking process. After you've gone through that, did it work? What do you need to modify? As we know, there's no two brains alike, so maybe you need to do something slightly different from your neighbor. Oftentimes, you get frustrated because you think, you know, somebody's soldier this concept that, well, if you just study in X-way, you know, things will work. That doesn't always work for people. Different people have different minds. You can approach things in different ways. So you have to reassess and think to yourself, does this work for me or not? That's the evaluation. These are guided experiences that can be introduced to individual conferences, checklists, thinking about your own processes, right? But as we said in the beginning, as far as becoming mindful of metacognition, it's actually becoming aware of these different processes, but not necessarily being married to the checklists that are down here, but rather to being sensitive to when you were fully present in understanding about your own new learning. So we have for you in the Canvas course room, we have the metacognitive awareness inventory, which most of you have already taken, I hope. So we ask you to look at these 18 different questions and to sort of give a thumbs up, thumbs down to this to actually see to what extent are you already metacognitively aware. What we wanted to ask you is basically, how did you do on that type of inventory? So if we look at the questions one by one, maybe sort of just so that we get a sense of what areas, there might be some of these that would be great for all of us to try to work on and improve, but there might be some things that you personally would like to identify, but if we agree that becoming metacognitively aware is a positive thing that will help us by thinking about how we think better, we will be able to learn better and consequently open ourselves to many more possibilities, then it would be good if we were high, if we were scoring very high on this inventory, but nobody's perfect, so there's going to be things that we all need to work on. So let's try to identify those. Number one, I am a good judge of how well I understand something. Number two, I can motivate myself to learn what I need to. So maybe there's not something I am passionate about, but I can turn it around and say, this is great, I'm going to do this anyways, even though it was not something that was naturally on my checklist or bucket list of things that I want to get done or learn, I can actually motivate myself to learn something when I know it's good for me to do so. Three, I try to use strategies that I've worked in the past, so I know myself, I know when I learn best, and so I'm applying what I know to the ones. Four, I know what the teacher expects me to learn. So in a class, I actually am aware of expectations where I understand the overall objectives. I know why I'm doing something. Five, I learn best when I already know something about the topic. This has to do with the concept of prior knowledge. Do I already know what I know about the information? Six, I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand while learning. This means have I used multiple representations of similar concepts? Seven, I ask myself if I learned as much as I could have once I finished a task. This is really important because we know that there's this law of minimal effort. People like to do the least amount possible to get the most amount out of it. This is actually flipping it on its head and asking, did you really maximize your learning potential on this particular task? Eight, I ask myself if I've considered all options when solving a problem. So not, what is my gut reaction? A, B, C, D and then I choose but I realize that A is good enough and I just choose A. So have I asked myself about all the different options? Have I considered all the different options before I resolve something? Nine, I think about what I really need to learn before I begin a task. This means again, this is very close to understanding the objectives. Do I really understand? For example, if I approach this type of a test with multiple types of problems on it, do I really know what I need to know for each of those different types of problems before I begin studying? Ten, I ask myself about how well I'm learning while I'm learning something new. So in the task while I'm undertaking something do I take the time to sort of reassess as I'm going along and ask myself, is this the best way to approach this? Is this the best way to go about this learning task? Eleven, I focus on the meaning and significance of new information. So do I take the time to clarify new terminology or new concepts before I launch into the learning task? Twelve, I learn more when I'm interested in the topic. So this is really kind of connected to number two. We know that when people are motivated they spend more time on task and they learn more quickly than people who are not motivated. So this is kind of connected. Can you make yourself be motivated for something you might not normally be motivated for? Thirteen, I use my intellectual strengths to compensate for my weaknesses. So am I actually using what already works or what works easily for me to compensate for things that might not? Remember we talked about attention and memory being key to learning. Well what happens if you know that you have a problem paying attention? Well you can extend your memory for something by writing things down for example or drawing diagrams. Are you able to use your intellectual strengths to compensate for those weaknesses that you might have in your learning processes? Fourteen, I use different learning strategies depending on the situation. Remember we talked about context is really important, so different types of learning are going to require different types of strategies so have you thought about that and have you modified the strategies for the different situations that you have? I ask myself periodically if I'm meeting my goals. Do you take the time as you are learning something to check in on yourself? How am I progressing? Am I making the progress I wanted? Sixteen, I find myself using helpful learning strategies automatically. So do you have a wide enough repertoire of ways to approach new learning that you're able to choose with efficiency the best strategies for the best types of learning moments? Seventeen, I ask myself if there was an easier way to do things after I finish a task. Many of us are just so happy to finish a learning task that we don't go back and revisit it. Remember we talked about the importance of taking the time to reflect. Was that the best I could have done? Is there something I could have done better? What would I do better next time to improve that? Eighteen, I set specific goals before I begin a task. So do I take the time to plan out how I want to use my resources in the best way possible applying a specific type of strategy because I know that that needs my needs the best in this particular learning moment. Have I taken the time to plan? We know that children as young as three exhibit metacognitive abilities when thinking about problem solving and we also know that four and five year olds can actually theorize about their own thinking processes. So it's also important to remember that the development of metacognitive skills is not just something that's good for thinking about thinking but higher metacognitive awareness benefits students in all other specific domain areas of learning. What's very interesting is that kids with high metacognitive skills tend to do well on standardized tests but kids who only study for the test aren't necessarily good at metacognitive skills so it always pays off to focus on developing metacognition more than just domain area content knowledge. So I'd like to know from you really quickly. Thinking about yourself how would you work to improve your own metacognitive skills? What would you do in the future to enhance your own metacognitive awareness? What is it that you personally will try to do more or better or refine in the future to enhance metacognition? Okay, now we turn to some of the evidence that exist in neuroscientific studies that have to do with metacognitive development. We know that there are studies related to cognitive control and metacognition. There's also other studies that have to do with the connection between explicit and implicit metacognition in theory of mind. Yet other studies that relate plasticity consciousness and metacognition. There are other studies that talk about the physiology of metacognitive awareness. So frontal lobe and decision making and metacognition the link between metacognition and reasoning introspective reflection thinking about yourself, how you feel and different brain areas that are related to that. So there's a lot of these different articles and these are available in the bundles in the classroom where you're invited to have a look at all of those. So big final question here is metacognition measurable? I'm making a presumption here. I presume metacognitive awareness is desirable. So if it is indeed desirable is now metacognition is it also something that's measurable? How can I tell if I'm getting better at being metacognitively aware? So the big ideas so far mindfulness and metacognition what does it mean to give yourself feedback and its relationship to higher order cognition and activities that stimulate metacognition questions you can ask yourself metacognitive awareness inventory and your scores there the benefits of early development of metacognition and spin off benefits in all different domain areas and the current research in neuroscience related to metacognition. So looking forward to all of your questions and please come to class prepared to discuss metacognition and metacognitive awareness.