 I'm Tom Mackie and I'm Trudy Jacobson and we're joined today by special guest Dr. Ronnie Mather who's associate professor of psychology at SUNY and Paris State College and also interim dean of our Center for Distance Learning. Welcome Ronnie. Thank you Tom. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Hi Trudy. Hi Ronnie. Yeah we are as well so what we really want to do now as we're approaching the end of the course is really dig deeper into what metacognition is. It is such an important part of the meta-literacy framework. We've looked at models, we looked at the meta-literate learner model several times throughout the course. We really want to take a closer look now and try to have a deeper understanding of the background of the term and how it fits in with meta-literacy. So first let me just ask a really basic question. What is metacognition and how and can you provide an example for us? Yeah I mean metacognition had a fourfold root in the history of ideas. The first probably was in classical epistemology, classical philosophy. Plato was interested in metacognition. His ideas around knowledge, his idea of knowledge as justified through belief is a metacognitive argument. So metacognition has been around since Plato and you can find other examples of it throughout the history of ideas. Its second root is probably in biology. I've read your text with some interest. Biology has always been interested in the way that complex systems monitor themselves. So I mean there is a biological element which I'll come on to later. The flaw was very interested in feelings of knowledge as well as verbalized knowledge. So there's the biology element and then of course you talk about in your text behavior, the sociology of action. In the 60s and 70s the sociology of action perspective was very interested in the reflective monitoring of behavior. So there was this aspect too and finally of course then came John Flavill whose text around in the 70s actually introduced metacognition into mainstream psychology. And that has continued right up into the present day with the cognitive neuroscience. So there's a four-fold root. I see aspects of it in your text and throughout your text. So those were the four principal origins I would say of metacognition. We did refer to Flavill in the first chapter of the text because we saw that as important as well. That's a really important context for having understanding of metacognition. So you asked for an example. Let me give you a very basic example. If I ask you to remember a telephone number, how would you do it? So let me give you one, 0418810393. Mainstream psychologists have often been interested in short-term memory and how it actually works. And since 1956 psychology undergraduates have been taught that individuals actually can memorize about 79 digits. But what we've actually found is the numbers closer to three to five. So you will remember that number and the way telephone numbers work is they're chunked. So you'll remember that 0418810 and then you'll do 334 usually is the way that your memory works. And people are conscious of that too. They will know their own strategies for remembering phone numbers. That is metacognition at a very basic level. That's an excellent example. I think we've all done that. Yeah, really. So these strategies that people use, I mean, it can be taught. Those are based in sort of psychology or absolutely. I mean, one of the one of the models you have of the meta-literate learner, it seemed to me to have three sort of elements within it. The first one, of course, is people learn through repetition. And actually repetition is a very bad name in modern educational theory. But you will not learn anything without repeating it. And of course, you don't need to repeat something by rote. You can repeat it by reformulating, paraphrasing, etc. So what I saw in your model there was a form of repetition that is extremely interesting. So I mentioned the phone number. You'll have about 30 seconds of short-term memory to remember that phone number. If you don't rehearse that information within 90 to 120 minutes, you'll forget it completely, which will then commit it to long-term memory. So I see within the meta-literate learner an assimilation of information and then using it almost immediately. And you have to use it almost immediately, or you'll lose it. The second aspect that was very interesting is your emphasis on visual literacy. A picture literally is worth a thousand words. Because it leaves within memory. There's a dual encoding. A picture will leave a verbal trace, a conceptual trace, and a picture trace, too. Whereas texts will only read a verbal trace. So I see that too. And the third aspect, of course, is communal participation. Human beings learn better when they learn collaboratively. I see all of the three aspects there of good learning practice. Interestingly enough, repetition is coming very much back into the fore with regard to educational psychology. That's a great point. It was interesting, too. We were talking earlier how in traditional models of information literacy, the metacognitive piece hasn't really been emphasized as much. It looks like it's going to be with the new ACRL framework, which has been influenced by meta literacy. But we're talking truly about how previously, what were the aspects of the four domains that we've introduced that you saw as part of information literacy originally, but now has been greatly expanded to the four domains? And before, I think it was really the cognitive and the behavioral aspects of being able to find, evaluate, use information. But now the metacognitive piece, and also the affective piece because very often people are sort of stymied by sort of fear, they can't do it, or everybody else can do it better than they can. And so why should they try? So these two new components really, I think are really making a difference in both how people are teaching it, but also if people are aware of it, sort of how they learn. Oh, there's clear, there's the clearest evidence of the affective component in the scientific literature on in this area with regard to educational psychology. Even within the scientific journals using double blind experiments, there was a recent one in science 2011. And the researchers found that people actually in high stakes exams, who wrote about their fears and reflected on their fears actually did better in the tests after the fact. And there's also there's also a strong belief now in the idea of people. People people almost certainly have an implicit understanding of their learning capacity, which is almost certainly wrong. It's formed, it's formed very, very early in life. And it's it's probably the reason why thinking about thinking, metacognition is so important is as it challenges that idea. People it challenges people to reevaluate their capacity to learn through the affective moment through the behavioral moment. So that's why the thinking about thinking is so important. It's a really good point, too, because I think learners today, they might make assumptions that maybe they're not a good writer, or they're not good at math because of an early experience they had. But if they're giving that thought that reflection later on, that might completely change their their thoughts on in fact, it's interesting because we've talked about how working with students in an environment and encouraging them to use technology, they might come into the classroom and into an online environment with certain assumptions about their own abilities with technology. But if they're if we encourage them challenge them to actually use the technology, and then to reflect on that use of technology, and where they succeeded, exactly that that's going to have a huge impact on their own thoughts about themselves. Oh, yeah, confidence is critical in matter, in metacognition. Absolutely, it's absolutely central to the to the way that people feel about themselves. And I mean, that that's one aspect of metacognition. We sometimes metacognition sometimes it gives people the impression that we're that we are not we're talking about conscious thought, conscious manipulation. But it's not purely that I mean, there's great debate in the in some of the scientific literature about metacognition in animals. And whether it's and whether animals are capable of metacognition. There's some evidence that they actually are, which would mean the metacognition is is prior even to language itself, which would be which is primordial as it can get. There's been, as I said, significant attention paid to this this idea. There's also attention paid to how can I put this inner language human beings spend a lot of time talking to themselves. They might not the either in their within their heads or or literally talking out loud to themselves about 25% of their waking states can be taken up by this. Yes. So it's a very, very important aspect of being human. So there's been a lot of philosophers of mind have been fascinated about this internal conversation and the way that it enables metacognition. And there's been very, very technical debates on whether it somehow reflects natural language or somehow different from it. But there's got there's absolutely clear evidence that Meg and Flavo was very interested in the feelings of metacognition. You know that tip of the tongue phenomenon, like what's the Queen's family name or what's Elton John's real name. And then you know that you know that. But you feel that you know it even even it's even pre discursive. So again, there's been great speculation whether whether metacognition is actually really hard wired into the brain or the capacity to do so. That's an interesting dimension. So this is something that's already happening, whether people are thinking about it or not. Right. Do you think then that there are because I think we often think that, you know, thinking about one's own thinking, you by foregrounding it, people will be more aware of it. If people are already doing this, what's the advantage then of having them be even more aware of this activity? They have increasingly, it's increasingly important that they are conscious of so doing those. There is considerable literature that people who think that learning capacity can be increased, their own learning capacity can be increased or far better learners. Just in the way that I mean, if I said to you, you know, if you if you go to a gym every day for two hours, you're going to get stronger. If you think about thinking, if you think about your learning processes, you're going to become a better learner. It really is the same. The scientific literature is very clear on that. So it has to be not not only the telephone number example I gave was somewhere between consciousness and sub and subconscious. So it's a good example. But the more conscious you are about learning, the better a learner you will be. So, Ronnie, can we go back to your question? You mentioned that communal learning, you know, is more effective learning. And I know very often learners say, I don't want to do it that way. I do better sort of on my own. So is there sort of a medic cognitive piece that goes along with the communal? Yeah, the question is, is that people often that the benefit of having a conversation or online or face to face is that people will repeat what they've learned. They will move from it to some other position and it will be constantly repeated. I think that's the most important thing. Somebody who is learning on their own, I would advise them to test and retest themselves. In many ways, that's what conversation is. It's a retest. And that's why the conversational, the peer element within online learning, for example, is so important. You're retesting your knowledge. And certainly, I would say to individual learners to emphasize, I would emphasize to them, the importance that they test and retest their own knowledge. I see chunking in your own book, your eight subheadings. Usually, there's usually about, you could go through it in two goes, eight concepts. So ideally, and almost as a matter of instinct, authors chunk their texts too. That's why an index is so if you were reading the first four concepts of the text, and you've been through it, and you wanted to check your knowledge, a simple test within 90 to 120 minutes will do that. It's just the way memory works. So I mean, again, to give an example of that, if that phone number was a bit, that I quoted earlier, was the phone number of a friend you'd had 25 years ago, and you'd forgotten the number, if I brought it to memory for you, you would remember that number easier than a completely foreign number, which shows that it's in there somewhere. I have a related question to that example, which I think is such an excellent one. And we think technology and emerging technologies is a key part of this and being able to adapt to the changing environments. But I was just thinking about that idea of how people remember and we kind of foreground this idea and that the chunking even of the numbers as you described. But is there a downside to the technology too, in that now that when you meet someone and you put their phone number in your phone, and people aren't remembering it the way that they do, or even having the rapid dial, you know, you're pushing a number instead of the actual number, even in this search engine capability, where sometimes, oh, we always say, oh, wait, let me look, let me Google that. Is there any kind of fear of, is there any downside to those technologies in that way? And this isn't quite the same thing, but I noticed now on my phone, if I start typing something, it fills in the rest of the word for me, so now maybe I don't even have to remember whole words, you know. There would be, there is, at the minute, is only speculation purely because we're still basically running around with the same genetic programs we had in the Ice Age. So, yeah, I mean there's speculation, but that kind of social evolution can happen fairly quickly. So there's been no definitive research on how this will affect our cognitive capacities to do, so I think there is a debit and a credit. One of the credits I've already mentioned is visual literacy too, in the way that Facebook, Facebook seems to me to work, because it works as a narrative. We've seen the power of the narrative in audience research with regard to soap operas that have ran in Europe for 25, 30 years. When the script writers get the story wrong, the viewer is writing and correct them on the biography. So some of these British soap operas that have ran for decades have continuity editors, because they have to remember, over a period of 25 to 30 years, how these stories have developed, and the characters have developed. Again, it's to do with a visual encoding of information, where again there's almost a visual encoding of somebody's life and narrative structure. So if somebody's presenting information, they really would want to think about not only textual presentation, but also visual if they really want to have an impact. Absolutely. In the multi-modality of that, that's such an interesting example of Facebook as a narrative, because that's really what it is. It's a timeline. So you have your individual timeline, but at the same time, it's intersecting with everyone else's timeline, and it's happening in real time, and you're constantly getting updates and status updates in terms of what people are doing. And it's very interesting that we're seeing this shift from the status updates that were very textual to the images, and now I think we're seeing even more of the video dynamic as part of that timeline. So people are actually taking videos of their cell phone or finding something on YouTube, and then that becomes a part of their daily narrative. And then that comes back to sort of the value of information, both sort of in and of itself, but also when you say, you know, YouTube videos, knowing the ethics of being able to use those things. So it's all sort of interconnected. Yes. And the idea of the producer, because the producer now with the cell phone, they're recording their world, they're making little animoto videos that are more produced, and then they're sharing those with this audience, automatic audience that they have on Facebook. I think the status updates too have this metacognitive piece to it. And again, I'm not sure if people are thinking about this because they're providing this daily update, but it seems to be a reflective, kind of an instant reflection in terms of what's going on in their lives. And then the fact that they can like something that other people are doing, or they comment on what other people are doing, there's an ongoing sort of commentary that's part of that narrative throughout the day. I mean, the metacognition may have arisen, literally a reading of your own mind. It might have arisen in an evolutionary sense with the ability to read other minds too. And that's perhaps why Facebook has become so popular. You're looking at your own life, you're reading your own life, but you're also reading, literally reading somebody else's. Again, just that's an insight from evolutionary psych that said it's the two, the ability to, as I said, understand yourself was somehow related to this capacity, to understand others' intentions. We really learned an awful lot about metacognition here today. And again, to hear of this outside of your own discipline brings a whole new perspective to it. And so you've been great today, Ronnie. We really appreciate these insights. Thank you so much, yeah. Taking this much deeper, so we really appreciate it. Thank you. And I just want to say to everyone else, as you're reading through the materials this week and as the course is winding down, think about your own thinking. Think about who you are and where you fall in this in terms of being a meta-literate learner. And think of all those different roles and roles that you may have already played out throughout the course. Yes, definitely. And I think I'm going to be figuring out how much time I'm spending talking to myself. And if it's less than 25 percent, I'm okay. And I'm going to see how many phone numbers I can actually remember. So thanks very much. We'll see you next week. Bye.