Metacognition, Week 2

1
Metacognition, Week 2

• Discussion questions,
• Brown Smiley 1978

2
Discussion questions

• If one considers these three chapters as
  "snapshots" of the field of metacognition, how
  has the terrain changed over the last 3 decades?
• In what ways can you map his claims about
  learning to solve problems in math onto phenomena
  (learning or other) in your area of interest?
• What happens when you apply Paris's functional
  perspective on motivation to Schoenfeld's
  description of teaching his students to be
  metacognitive in math problem-solving? (Does it
  add explanatory power? does it miss important
  aspects?)
• What jumped out at you when reading these
  chapters?

3
Brown Smiley, 1978in Child Development

• Three descriptive studies of study strategy use
  by readers of various ages
• Earlier lab-task studies found that even young
  children selectively attend to most important
  aspects of stimuli BUT
• Younger children not as good at separating
  important from unimportant
• These studies extend this idea to a more
  realistic and educationally relevant task
  studying to remember text

4
Method

• Materials (all three studies)
• Two Japanese folk tales, roughly equivalent in
• Interestingness
• Readability (5th grade per Dale-Chall index)
• Length
• Number of idea units
• Idea unit importance pre-assigned (one quarter to
  each importance level)

5
Experiment 1

• Subjects 80 college students paid 2
• Groups

Intentional
Incidental
Immediate recall
Delayed recall
6
Procedure

• First variable manipulated
• Half told the goal was to recall (intentional)
• Half told they would comment on how useful the
  stories would be for moral education (incidental)
• Listen to story while reading printed version
• Second variable manipulated
• Half given immediate recall (write as much as you
  can remember)
• Half given 5-minutes to either write an
  evaluation of the text (incidental) or study
  (intentional)

7
Analysis 3-way ANOVA

• Independent variables
• Incidental vs intentional
• Immediate vs delay
• Importance level
• Dependent variable
• Thought units (T-units) recalled

8
p. 1079
3-way interaction, plt.005
9
Study 2

• Goal Replicate study 1, see if students improve
  own recall if given extra time to study
• 40 additional college students
• Same materials
• Stories counterbalanced (half got cat on day 1,
  half dragon reversed on day 2)

10
Procedure (study 2)

• Day 1
• All told they would recall gist of story
• Listen to read story as before
• 5-min interpolated task (word puzzle)
• Attempted gist recall
• Given 5 more minutes to study (given notepads,
  highlighters, etc.)

11
Procedure, cont.

• Day 2
• Listen to read story as before
• 5-min interpolated task (word puzzle)
• Attempted gist recall
• Manipulation Half told it helps some people to
  underline or take notes and you may do that if
  you want to
• Given 5 more minutes to study (given notepads,
  highlighters, etc.)

12
Analysis 3-way ANOVA

• Independent Variables
• Immediate vs delay (within-subjects)
• Prompt vs no-prompt
• Importance level
• Dependent variable
• Thought units (T-units) recalled
• No effects involving story/day or sex, data
  collapsed (same for all three studies)

13
(No Transcript)
14
Immed/dely
Immediate-delay X Importance plt.001
15
Study 3 Development

• 3 age groups
• 51 young (5th grade)
• 85 middle (7th 8th grade)
• 59 old (11th 12th grade)
• Same materials and procedure, except
• Pre-training on procedure with 2 other fairy
  tales
• Heard story twice
• No retention interval with interpolated task

16
(No Transcript)
17
Spontaneous vs prompted

• Inspected texts for signs of note-taking and
  underlining, compared prompted vs spontaneous
  use.
• Spontaneous underlining in all three age groups
• Spontaneous note-taking in two older groups

18
How much underlining, of which units?
19
How much did it help?
20
(No Transcript)
21
(No Transcript)
22
Brown Smileys interpretation

• As children mature they can increasingly predict
• What are the essential organizing features and
  crucial elements of text
• Make increasingly good use of study time.
• From 7th grade on, selectively allocated study to
  important information
• Oldest kids more sensitive to levels of importance

23
Brown Smileys interpretation, cont

• Telling kids to use strategies
• Increased strategy use BUT
• had no effect on recall
• Methodological implications of the above
• Combining data from spontaneous and
  non-spontaneous strategy users may have washed
  out effects of strategy use in other studies

24
Brown Smileys interpretation

• Theoretical implications
• Previous work on isolated lab tasks asking kids
  to predict their recall (e.g., of lists of words)
  is problematic developmentally
• Less aware
• Less able to recall or predict metacognitive
  stuff
• Argues for tasks where strategy use,
  metacognition, and study effectiveness studied
  together
• Avoids self-reports
• Reflects real connections among aspects of
  metacognition text knowledge