Handbook of Metacognition in Education

Douglas J. Hacker, John Dunlosky, Arthur C. Graesser, Douglas J. Hacker, John Dunlosky, Arthur C. Graesser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780805863543
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135591939
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Providing comprehensive coverage of the theoretical bases of metacognition and its applications to educational practice, this compendium of focused and in-depth discussions from leading scholars in the field:

• represents an intersection of education, cognitive science, and technology;
• serves as a gateway to the literature for researchers and practitioners interested in one or more of the wide array of topics included; and
• sets the standard for scholarship for theoretical research and practical applications in this field.

The Handbook of Metacognition in Education — covering Comprehension Strategies, Metacognitive Strategies, Metacomprehension, Writing, Science and Mathematics, Individual Differences, Self-Regulated Learning, Technology, Tutoring, and Measurement — is an essential resource for researchers, faculty, students, curriculum developers, teachers, and others interested in using research and theory on metacognition to guide and inform educational practice.

1 A Growing Sense of “Agency”

Douglas J. Hacker
University of Utah

John Dunlosky
Kent State University

Arthur C. Graesser
University of Memphis

Since the 1998 publication of our first edited volume, Metacognition in Educational Theory and Practice, metacognition has continued to be an important area of research, and its applications to education have continued to grow. The topics covered in our earlier volume included problem solving, reading, writing, self-regulation, technology, and metacomprehension. In the current volume, we have expanded on those earlier topics to reflect the growing interest in the subject. We now include chapters on comprehension strategies, metacognitive strategies, mathematics and science, individual differences, self-regulated learning, technology, tutoring, and measurement.

A common theme running throughout all these chapters is the notion of agency: successful students take charge of their own learning. At a minimum, taking charge requires students to be aware of their learning, to evaluate their learning needs, to generate strategies to meet their needs, and to implement those strategies. Self-awareness, self-determination, and self-direction are the characteristics that Kluwe (1982) used when he described people as “agents of their own thinking” (p. 222). As agents of our own thinking, we construct our understanding of ourselves and the world, we control our thoughts and behaviors, and we monitor the consequences of them.

The sense of agency in metacognition puts the focus of attention clearly on the individual person. But who is this person? With the rise of cognitive science from behaviorism in the 1960s, the intent was to focus on the person as a thinking agent as opposed to an organism mechanically reacting to stimuli. Somewhat ironically, many of our colleagues in cognitive science simply replaced the empty-headed mechanics of behaviorism with a more sophisticated machine that processes information, but nonetheless follows a simple mechanistic model. With the growing interest in metacognition, we have an opportunity to look at the person in a more full-blown complexity, the self-aware agent who can construct his or her understanding of the world.

Many insights into the person (the self-aware agent) have been provided through investigations of self-concept. Much can be learned about metacognition by examining what we know about self-concept. Since the philosophical and psychological investigations of self-concept by William James (1890), self-concept has become a diverse, multifaceted construct studied in a variety of disciplines: sociology, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, literature, and even computer science. The diversity of the construct of self-concept can be illustrated by the numerous “selfs” that have been studied: minimal self, physical self, mental self, spiritual self, narrative self, extended self, ecological self, dialogical self, autobiographical self, moral self, historical self, perceived self, remembering self, remembered self, automatic self, amnesiac self, enacted self, cognitive self, and working self.

Such a diversity of selfs is daunting, but each conceptualization of self provides some insight into the self-molding and shaping agent. Consider Dennett’s (1989) narrative self, which consists of an integrated collection of stories (real or imagined) that an individual tells about himself or herself to describe a specific unified agent, referred to by Dennett as the “center of narrative gravity.” This narrative self provides the foundations for our predispositions, interests, and aspirations, all of which influence the kinds of activities we choose to accomplish and the amount of effort we choose to put forth in accomplishing them. Or, consider Conway’s (2005) working self, which refers to an active goal hierarchy that guides and regulates pre-existing knowledge so that new knowledge can enter longterm memory. Our working self provides the bases for how we engage in online regulation of learning. Finally, consider Barresi and Juckes’ (1997) dialogical self, which refers to the self that emerges as a result of interactions with individuals, groups, and culture. Our dialogical self provides input on how we perceive our social interactions and how we manage to negotiate those social interactions in the selection of goals and how we pursue them.

There is considerable overlap between the notion of agency that is derived from investigations of self-concept and the notion of agency from investigations of metacognition: comprehending the world and knowing that we comprehend, self-regulating and monitoring our thoughts, evaluating our current cognitive status in pursuit of self-imposed goals, revising our goals in light of developing cognitive and affective states, motivating ourselves, developing strategies and heuristics to make ourselves more capable of adapting to changing situations, and understanding others to gain understanding of ourselves. These are the themes that dominate the literature on self-concept and that run throughout this volume.

Each chapter describes how people guide their learning or how they can potentially be instrumental in guiding others’ learning. In the opening chapters, Margaret McKeown, Isabel Beck, Joanna Williams, and J. Grant Atkins show how students understand and self-support their reading behaviors and comprehension of text. In the subsequent chapters, José Otero, Danielle McNamara, and Joseph Magliano further explore the role of the self in reading by discussing how various strategies, such as question generation and self-explanation, may support quality metacognition and effective reading. Even here, however, McNamara and Magliano argue that some aspects of metacognition are not always highly related to the use of reading strategies. They encourage others to investigate the interactive and dynamic nature of reading processes, strategy use, and strategy knowledge.

Michael Serra and Janet Metcalfe argue that students must be able to accurately evaluate their learning to take full advantage of metacognitive monitoring while studying. The importance of accurate metacognitive monitoring arises in other chapters as well, such as those offered by Sigmund Tobias, Keith Thiede, and their colleagues. For instance, Thiede, Griffin, Wiley, and Redford lament how students often have difficulties accurately evaluating how well they have learned or comprehended text materials. They then discuss factors that may limit the accuracy of judgments of text comprehension (like Serra and Metcalfe do for other metacognitive judgments) and then proceed to describe several techniques that hold promise for consistently improving students’ monitoring abilities. A key assumption is that by improving students’ ability to monitor their comprehension, they will be better able to discover what they do not understand and hence correct their confusion, such as by re-reading or asking a teacher or peer for assistance. Thus, enhancing this aspect of a student’s metacognition may directly improve their education.

Another reason why a metacognitive approach to education has been so popular is that the basic components of metacognition can apply to almost any task that a student wants to perform. For instance, metacognitive components include (a) knowledge and beliefs about cognition, (b) monitoring cognition, and (c) regulating cognition. Knowledge and beliefs about cognition include constructs such as self-efficacy, or the degree to which a person believes he or she can successfully complete a given task. Individual differences in self-efficacy may contribute to student successes across many domains. Moreover, beyond reading and memorizing simple concepts, students may monitor and regulate their ongoing performance on any cognitively demanding task, such as while they are composing a paper for class or when they are learning mathematics and difficult science concepts.

The pervasive nature of metacognition in student scholarship is illustrated by the range of topics covered in this handbook. For instance, several chapters highlight how metacognitive approaches have been (and can be) applied to student writing, problem solving, and learning within specific domains, such as mathematics and science. Concerning metacognition and writing, Karen Harris and her colleagues focus on how strategy instruction can benefit the quality of students’ writing. The strategy instruction focuses on training several metacognitive processes, such as teaching students to monitor their performance as they write. Their instructional program, called self-regulated strategy development, has a phenomenal track record for boosting the quality of students’ writing. Douglas Hacker and his colleagues further emphasize the importance of metacognition to understanding writing skills. In fact, they pose the provocative argument that defining writing as applied metacognition provides a unified framework for understanding the larger field of writing research.

Concerning science and mathematics, Barbara White and her colleagues discuss the metacognitive expertise that students will need in order to regulate their scientific inquiry as they conduct research projects. They show how training strategies and self-regulatory activities can boost students’ learning about how to explore and inquire about science. This program appears especially useful for lower-achieving students. Annemie Desoete focuses on lower-achieving students in mathematics. Students with mathematical learning disabilities appear to have relatively normal intelligence, yet they demonstrate a specific deficit in mathematics. Desoete entertains whether metacognitive problems contribute to these disabilities, and how other aids can benefit these students when metacognitive interventions fail. Both chapters underscore the value of a metacognitive approach for better understanding, and potentially remediating, the difficulties that many students encounter as they tackle difficult problems in science and mathematics.

Students do not always study and complete homework in a solitary environment, but rather their learning is supported by other students, teachers, and tutoring systems. In the present handbook, multiple chapters focus on how other people and technologies can help promote student learning and metacognition. Phil Winne and John Nesbit describe multiple ways that students’ metacognition can go awry as they study. Students often inaccurately monitor, they are unduly influenced by fallible heuristics, and they may not seek help in a useful way. Most relevant here, these authors describe how computer technologies can be used to promote successful metacognition and learning, such as by prompting students to deeply process to-be-learned materials and to assess their comprehension while on task. Similarly, Ken Koedinger and his colleagues offer a detailed discussion of their research with computer-based tutoring systems. Their systems provide several kinds of metacognitive support that have been demonstrated to promote learning that is retained over the long term, and that is evident on transfer tests. Roger Azevedo and Amy Witherspoon synthesize research on hypermedia learning with an information processing theory of self-regulated learning. In doing so, they offer guidelines for how to support effective self- regulated learning with hypermedia.

Although computer-based tutors and other computer technologies are being used to promote effective metacognition and student learning, what is striking is how little is known about the metacognitive abilities of others who have driven education practices for centuries: teachers and tutors themselves. In groundbreaking chapters, Art Graesser and his colleagues consider the metacognitive abilities of tutors, and Gerald Duffy and his associates discuss the metacognition of teachers. Both areas are largely unexplored. For instance, as noted by Duffy et al., “While researchers and educators claim frequently that teachers are metacognitive, detailed characterizations based on empirical qualitative or quantitative evidence are scarce” (p. 553). In both chapters, the authors do an excellent job of not only discussing key metacognitive issues in each area (e.g., what metacognitive illusions tutors may hold that can undermine their effectiveness), but they do so in a manner that will stimulate systematic research programs in these relatively unexplored areas.

In this handbook, you also will find a number of chapters that are meant to offer foundations in conducting metacognitive research. Sigmund Tobias and Howard Everson describe the knowledge monitoring assessment tool. Using this tool, Tobias and his colleagues have shown that accurate knowledge monitoring, namely being able to distinguish between what one does versus does not know, is related to educational outcomes across a variety of domains. As important, Gregory Schraw provides an overview of basic measurement issues in metacognitive research that is relevant to understanding the measures described in other chapters in this handbook. Finally, John Dunlosky and colleagues argue that the generalization of metacognitive research, and research in general, to realworld contexts might be better conceptualized and understood from the framework of representative design rather than ecological validity.

Our brief overview in this chapter merely scratches the surface of the number of issues and topics raised about metacognition in this handbook. Other topics include analyses of metacognition and individual differences in gender, culture, and motivation, while other contributors consider the potential role of metacognition in teaching students to read and even the educational benefits of having students teach a computer agent. Despite the distinct topics that are discussed within any given chapter, most chapters herald a common theme: people’s metacognitive processes, when appropriately engaged, can be used to scaffold effective learning, problem solving, and comprehension. Our self-concepts motivate us toward successes or failures. With continued efforts to understand how to promote effective metacognition and healthy self-concepts, research on metacognition in education promises to further improve student education. Perhaps most important, each chapter in this handbook highlights how these promises are currently being actualized in the laboratory and in the classroom.

Based on the growth and impact of metacognitive research in education since 1998, we expect that many new advances will arise in the next decade. These advances will further highlight both the promises and limits of using metacognition to improve student education. We hope that the next generation of researchers will continue to engage in active discussion and research that explores the utility of metacognition in education. Their insights will no doubt inspire publication of the next handbook on metacognition in education.

References

Barresi, J. & Juckes, T. J. (1997). Personology and the narrative interpretation of lives. Journal of Personality, 65, 693–719.

Conway, M. A. (2005). Memory and the self. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 594–628.

Dennett, D. C. (1989). The origins of selves. Cogito, 3, 163–173.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: H. Holt.

Kluwe, R. H. (1982). Cognitive knowledge and executive control: Metacognition. In D. R. Griffin (Ed.), Animal mind—human mind (pp. 201–224). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Part I
Comprehension Strategies

2 The Role of Metacognition in Understanding and Supporting Reading Comprehension*

Margaret G. McKeown and Isabel L. Beck
University of Pittsburgh

What do we want students to do as they read? Do we want them to be consciously aware of their processes in order to have control over them? What is the level of awareness and control that best supports comprehension? We will move toward addressing these questions, beginning by reviewing the concept of metacognition through its historical roots, as described by Brown, Bransford, Ferrera, and Campione (1983), and discussing how metacognition has found application to reading in the form of strategies instruction. We then describe an alternative approach to comprehension instruction and discuss results of a study that compared the two approaches.

Origins of Metacognition and its Route to Reading

Brown et al. (1983) view the concept of metacognition as having four historical roots, each of which has provided foundation for approaches to strategies instruction, which we will take up in the next section. The first root is the issue of verbal reports as data—how reliable are people’s reports of their thinking processes? What can we express about what we know, or how does what we can express relate to what we know? The second root is the notion of executive control, which is derived from information processing models. These models feature a central processor that can control its own operations, which include planning, evaluating, monitoring, and revising. The third root is self-regulation, processes by which active learners direct and continuously fine-tune their actions. The fourth root that Brown et al. see underlying metacognition is what they call other regulation, or the transfer of control from other to self. This kind of regulation is based on Vygotsky’s theory that all psychological processes begin as social and are then transformed through supportive experience to the intrapersonal.

A number of the components of metacognition that Brown et al. discuss within the four roots have relevance for reading. Actions such as self-regulating, planning, evaluating, and monitoring align well with what researchers have come to see as the processes in which readers need to engage in order to achieve successful comprehension. As Baker and Brown (1984) put it: “Since effective readers must have some awareness and control of the cognitive activities they engage in as they read, most characterizations of reading include skills and activities that involve metacognition” (p. 354).

Such characterizations of reading developed as a cognitive processing perspective on reading took hold. Initially, information-processing models were applied to fundamental psychological processes of thinking and learning. Studies of reading from this perspective highlighted reading as a complex mental process with various interacting subprocesses. With this perspective, it became clear that precisely because of the complex nature of reading, many opportunities existed to intervene and help students develop more effective processes.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part I Comprehension Strategies
• Part II Metacognitive Strategies
• Part III Metacomprehension
• Part IV Writing
• Part V Science and Mathematics
• Part VI Individual Differences
• Part VII Self-Regulated Learning
• Part VIII Technology
• Part IX Tutoring
• Part X Measurement
• Index