Dimensions of Thinking and Cognitive Instruction

Beau Fly Jones, Lorna Idol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780805803464
• eBook ISBN: 9781134746132
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

By establishing a conceptual framework and a common language for educators to work together, this volume attempts to answer the challenge facing all teachers -- how can students improve the quality of their thinking? Methods of strengthening the thought process include: helping students learn to monitor their attention and commitments; asking questions that require students to organize, analyze, and integrate information; setting tasks that involve complex processes such as problem solving and research; and modeling and reinforcing fair-mindedness.

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How Metacognition Can Promote Academic Learning and Instruction

Scott G. Paris

University of Michigan

Peter Winograd

University of Kentucky

This chapter is about metacognition and academic learning. The central message is that students can enhance their learning by becoming aware of their own thinking as they read, write, and solve problems in school. Teachers can promote this awareness directly by informing students about effective problem-solving strategies and discussing cognitive and motivational characteristics of thinking. The twin benefits of this “consciousness-raising” are: (a) it transfers responsibility for monitoring learning from teachers to students themselves, and (b) it promotes positive self-perceptions, affect, and motivation among students. In this manner, metacognition provides personal insights into one's own thinking and fosters independent learning.

A great deal of research supports the importance of metacognition in cognitive development and academic learning (Brown, Bransford, Fer-rara, & Campione, 1983; Paris & Lindauer, 1982; Paris, Wasik, & van der Westhuizen, 1988; Pressley, Borkowski, & O'Sullivan, 1985). In the first section of this chapter we review this research noting both the virtues and the problems associated with metacognition, and we argue that it is time to develop a new perspective on the construct. In the second section of the chapter we define metacognition as knowledge about cognitive states and abilities that can be shared among individuals while at the same time expanding the construct to include affective and motivational characteristics of thinking.

The remainder of the chapter illustrates how students and teachers share and apply metacognition in classrooms. In the third section we discuss how students’ understanding of academic tasks and perceptions of themselves as learners influence their judgments and beliefs about their personal learning. These judgments and beliefs affect the strategies they choose and the effort they expend in school. In the final section of the chapter we discuss instructional methods that enhance metacognition and learning. We describe methods that facilitate metacognitive dialogues in the classroom because such discussions allow teachers and students to exchange their views about strategies and motivation required to master academic tasks. Knowledge about learning is shared explicitly among teachers and students in these dialogues. We describe how instructional interactions that promote metacognition facilitate self-regulated learning. Our point is not to establish metacognition as a curriculum objective, but rather to show how students’ understanding of their own thinking can be enhanced by teachers.

ELUSIVE DEFINITIONS AND FUZZY CONCEPTS

A reasonable starting point is to define metacognition but most researchers eschew rigid or operational definitions. Instead, they use examples of students’ thinking about thinking in order to illustrate metacognition. Consider the following reflections of expert readers as they think aloud about text they are reading (from Afflerbach & Johnston, 1986):

… I don't understand very well this word … but … my guess right now … is that it's—it's many things put together somehow … so—what I'll try to do … probably is try to understand this word … I'll expect to understand it after reading … the rest of the text … because … it's obvious that the word is very important … (p. 59)

… I would be skeptical immediately … uh—to be quite honest … uhm … but—but … that's because of my knowledge of the subject … and perhaps I ought to concentrate more on … exactly how they're saying this … (p. 67)

… I kind of feel insecure reading these things so I would … I'm gonna try to read it again … (p. 69)

These vignettes show how readers try to evaluate the importance of ideas in text and check their understanding as they construct meaning. They assess their own knowledge, confidence, and strategies. These are clearly cognitive judgments about their own cognitive states and abilities, and they conform to conventional descriptions of metacognition.

Flavall (1978), in his pioneering work, chose to emphasize the learner's knowledge about variables related to the person, task, and strategy in order to compartmentalize metacognitive knowledge that might be germane to remembering. Brown (1978) reviewed the same early research on metacognition but emphasized aspects of executive cognition such as planning, monitoring, and revising one's thinking. Most researchers have now blended those twin approaches into a definition that emphasizes (a) knowledge about cognitive states and processes and (b) control or executive aspects of metacognition (Borkowski, 1985; Brown et al., 1983; Wellman, 1985). This familiar dichotomy of the mind is consistent with information processing accounts of declarative and procedural knowledge and captures two essential features of metacognition—self-appraisal and self-management of cognition.

Cognitive Self-Appraisal

Self-appraisal includes personal reflections about one's knowledge states and abilities. Metacognitions of this sort answer questions such as, “Do I know the capital of Idaho? Can I memorize a list of 20 words in 10 minutes? Can I derive a formula to calculate the area of a trapezoid?” These questions interrogate particular bits of knowledge or one's ability to meet a cognitive goal. In Flavell's terms, they are judgments about one's personal cognitive abilities, task factors that influence cognitive difficulty, or cognitive strategies that may facilitate or impede performance. The appraisals often reflect static judgments because people are asked to assess knowledge or gauge ability in a hypothetical situation. Paris, Lipson, and Wixson (1983) described metacognitive knowledge in terms of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge because self-appraisal answers questions about what you know, how you think, and when and why to apply knowledge or strategies.

Many students have shown that students are not adept at cognitive self-appraisal. For example, young students often mistakenly believe that they understand what they hear or read (Markman & Gorin, 1981). They have an illusion of comprehension following reading because they rarely monitor their knowledge (Wagoner, 1983). Paris and Myers (1981) observed that 10-year-olds failed to identify many scrambled phrases and nonsense words while reading. Similarly, young students often believe they are ready for a test before the information has been retained well (Flavell, 1978; Pressley, Snyder, Levin, Murray, & Ghatala, 1987). Children's abilities to appraise various reading purposes, strategies, and their own understanding improves with age and reading ability (Canney & Winograd, 1979; Forrest-Pressley & Waller, 1984; Myers & Paris, 1978). In contrast, self-management refers to “metacognitions in action”—in other words, how metacognition helps to orchestrate cognitive aspects of problem solving. For example, the ability of students to form good plans, to use a variety of strategies, and to monitor and revise ongoing performance are executive cognitions that help guide and coordinate thinking (Baker & Brown, 1984). Self-management is reflected in the plans that learners make before tackling a task, in the adjustments they make as they work, and in the revisions they make afterwards. Paris and Lindauer (1982) described these executive actions as evaluating, planning, and regulating. Students who engage these tactics are good trouble-shooters, indeed, even trouble-avoiders, because they are resourceful at repairing their own problem solving (Wittrock, 1986).

Cognitive self-management is a popular aspect of metacognition because it has direct implications for students’ performance and subsequent instruction. Researchers and teachers alike are less interested in what children report about what they know and are much more interested in the efficiency and effectiveness of their actual thinking skills (Winne & Marx, 1987). Self-management of thinking applies to virtually any domain of problem solving in or out of school, and thus provides a rich source of information about learning and development because metacognition helps students interpret and adapt to learning experiences.

Virtues of Metacognition

These two aspects of metacognition, self-appraisal and self-management of thinking, have helped cognitive and educational psychologists to focus on important areas of children's learning that have often been neglected. Thus, metacognition as a psychological construct and a dimension of thinking has several virtues (Marzano et al., 1987). First, it focuses our attention on the role of awareness and executive management of our own thinking. Metacognition helps learners become active participants in their own performance rather than the passive recipients of instruction and imposed experiences. It is consistent with constructivist accounts of learning and development (Paris & Byrnes, 1989). Second, because metacognition emphasizes personal appraisal and management, it is oriented to analyses of individual differences in cognitive development and learning. Such a perspective has been sorely lacking in developmental and educational psychology despite the plea for theories that are sensitive to individual differences in styles and abilities. Third, meta-cognition is obviously embedded in cognitive development and represents the kind of knowledge and executive abilities that develop with experience and schooling. It is both a product and producer of cognitive development.

A fourth general virtue of metacognition is that the constructive, personal, strategic thinking that is involved in metacognition is amenable to classroom instruction. Teachers can encourage metacognitive dialogues and promote self-appraisal and self-management skills (Paris, Wasik, & Turner, in press). A fifth virtue, which we discuss later, is that self-appraisal and self-management invite both cognitive and motivational explanations because skill and will are interwoven in reflections and anticipations about learning (Corno & Mandinach, 1983; Covington, 1983; Nicholls, 1983; Paris & Cross, 1983). Thus, traditional educational problems such as the transfer of learning, production and generalization of strategies, and learned helplessness can be analyzed from new perspectives provided by metacognition. In our view, many of these traditional problems have been intransigent to theoretical solutions or instructional interventions because the analyses did not focus on the combined cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational aspects of academic learning (Johnston & Winograd, 1985; Winograd & Paris, 1989).

Persistent Problems

Despite the many virtues of metacognition for developmental and educational psychology, the definition of metacognition remains a thorny issue. Any cognition that one might have relevant to knowledge and thinking might be classified as a metacognition, and thus inclusive definitions are impossible. That is precisely why Wellman (1985) defined metacognition as a “fuzzy concept” and is perhaps the reason why Brown, Flavell, and others have used prototypical examples of metacognition to illustrate metacognition rather than operational definitions that may constrain the construct. Thus, metacognition remains open-ended and definitions of metacognition almost become projective tests. Researchers bemoan the imprecision of the term and attribute to it those things that they feel are important about thinking and learning. As Flavell (1985) has noted, the really important things about cognitive development are usually difficult to pin down, define, and demarcate.

The disadvantages of fuzzy definitions of metacognition are numerous. First, there is a fundamental disagreement about whether metacognition means conscious awareness of thinking. Some researchers argue that metacognition can be unconscious, tacit, and inaccessible (e.g., Pressley, Borkowski, & Schneider, 1987). These views tend to emanate from people oriented to the executive functions of metacognition and self-management. Other researchers focus on reports of cognitive self-appraisal derived from interviews, think-aloud protocols, and subjective reports. Thus, various orientations to metacognition have invited different methodologies and definitions.

A second disadvantage of fuzzy definitions involves measurement. If metacognition is equated with verbal reports and awareness, there are serious issues of validity and reliability. Critics point out that subjects’ verbal reports are often inaccurate (Garner, 1987), although verbal reports about performance seem to be more accurate when they are collected immediately following performance and the questions are designed to interrogate specific aspects of thinking (Afflerbach & Johnston, 1984; Garner, 1988). The problem of measurement is severe when considering the performance of experts who may be unaware of the complexity of their thinking or novices who may be unable to explain their thinking. Perhaps in both cases subjects have knowledge about their mental states and abilities but cannot access or report the information.

The consequences of open-ended definitions and difficult measurement of metacognition reveal a third disadvantage with the construct, namely, it cannot have explanatory power. It is gratuitous to attribute performance variation to levels of metacognition when it can only be inferred from performance itself. Attributions to good or poor metacognition when it is not measured independently are simply attributes to the “ghost in the machine” and add no psychological explanation.

A fourth disadvantage of the construct metacognition is that prescriptions for instruction or intervention are unclear without a better understanding of how metacognition facilitates or impedes learning and performance. We believe that these problems are serious and may hinder research and conceptual development on the issue of metacognition. The important aspects of self-appraisal and self-management can be infused in other kinds of theories and research that avoid these problems in definition and measurement, and thus it may not be surprising to see the term gather growing criticism among academic researchers (Cavanaugh & Perlmutter, 1982) while simultaneously achieving popularity among educators who are seeking new ways of fostering cognitive instruction and self-regulated learning. What are we to do?

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON METACOGNITION

We believe that the construct of metacognition is too important to be set adrift. There is widespread enthusiasm for the emphasis on metacognition, both in teachers’ instruction and in students’ independent learning. Revived interest in Vygotsky's theory of socially mediated learning has initiated searches for cognitive variables that are amenable to social exchange. Metacognition is an excellent candidate because insight about self-appraisal and self-management can be promoted by other people as well as by self-discovery. In a sense, metacognition is a mirror on one's knowledge and thinking, and the reflection can come from within the individual or from other people (Paris, Jacobs, & Cross, 1987). It is our belief that metacognition fits well within the new social/cultural/cognitive emphases on learning and development and forms an appropriate model for education that has not been provided by behavioral, Piagetian, or information processing theories.

Our proposal is straightforward. First, we propose to limit the construct of metacognition to knowledge about cognitive states and abilities that can be shared among people. Second, we propose to expand the scope of metacognition to include affective and motivational characteristics of thinking. We outline each of these proposals in the following sections.

Metacognition as Shared Knowledge

Awareness and verbal reporting are the most likely ways to exhibit or share knowledge about thinking, but other ways are possible (e.g., indirect verbal prompts, teaching strategies, written accounts, and so forth). Shared knowledge is observable, verifiable, and measu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 How Metacognition can Promote Academiclearning and Instruction
• 2 Self-Regulated Cognition: Interdependence Ofmetacognition, Attributions, and Self-Esteem
• 3 Conceptualizing
• 4 Developing Meaningful Conceptual Understanding in Science
• 5 Reasoning about Communication and Communicative Skill
• 6 Reading Comprehension as a Dimension of Thinking
• 7 Individuals and Environments in Writing Instruction
• 8 Mathematical and Scientific Problem Solving: Findings, Issues, and Instructional Implications
• 9 Science Education and the Cognitive Psychology of Science
• 10 Teacher Decision Making
• 11 Learning Strategies for Acquiring Useful Knowledge
• 12 Teaching Thinking and Content Knowledge: Toward an Integrated Approach
• 13 The Nature and Nurture of Creativity
• 14 Critical and Reflective Thinking: A Philosophical Perspective
• 15 Dimensions of Thinking: A Critique
• Conclusions
• Author Index
• Subject Index