Metacognition

1
Metacognition

• SE - Current Issues in Technology Enhanced
  Learning
• 24.05.2005
• Monika Pilgerstorfer

2
Metacognition

• Thinking about thinking
• (Blakely, 1990 Livingston, 1997)
• Flavell (1977)
• Child cognition
• Developmental changes in
• Metamemory
• Metacomprehension
• Metacommunication

3
Metacognition

• Knowledge and active control over ones own
  cognitive processes when engaged in learning
• metacognitive knowledge
• metacognitive regulation

4
Metacognitive Knowledge

• Knowledge about human learning and information
  processing
• Knowledge about the learning task at hand and its
  corresponding processing demands
• Knowledge about cognitive and metacognitive
  strategies and their appropriate use

5
Metacognitive Regulation

• processes that can be applied in order to control
  cognitive activities and achieve cognitive goals
• planning and monitoring cognitive activities and
  further revision depending on the result of these
  activities

6
Elements of Metacognition

• Metamemory
• Knowledge about memory systems and memory
  strategies
• Metacomprehension
• Learners awareness about what he/she knows /
  does not know

7
Elements of Metacognition

• Self-regulation
• Learners adjustment to errors
• Covers social interaction
• Schema Training
• Helps learners to develop their own cognitive
  structures from understanding information and
  experiences

8
Metacognition

• Students perception of themselves has an impact
  of their performance, achievements and
  self-management of their own learning.
• Metacognition influences the students
  orientation to learning tasks and problem
  solving.
• Performing the task or solving the problem
  influences their belief in their personal and
  academic abilities, therefore metacognition
  allows students to believe in themselves.

9
Metacognitive Strategies

• Blakely Spence (1990)
• Connecting new information to former knowledge
• Selecting thinking strategies deliberately
• Planning, monitoring and evaluating thinking
  processes
• ? Utilising these strategies a learner can
  identify a problem, research alternative
  solutions, evaluate and decide on a final
  solution.

10
Metacognitive Strategies

• Macpherson (2002)
• Metacognitive explanation
• Scaffolded instruction
• Cognitive choaching
• Head-to-hands
• Co-operative learning

11
Metacognitive Explanation

• Involves the teacher
• Talking through the problem, start to ask the
  student for suggestions
• Thinking aloud
• Observing the process of solving a problem

12
Scaffolded Instruction

• Exploring problems with little help from the
  teacher
• Teachers role is to support
• Teacher should intervene if the student is
  experiencing difficulties
• What do you think would happen if?
• How can you check to see if you are correct or
  not?

13
Cognitive Choaching

• Teacher prompts student from solution
• Students are encouraged to explain what he/she
  did to the other students
• On-going assessment of students performance
• Students are challenged to achieve new goals with
  different levels of difficulty

14
Co-operative Learning

• Utilises the social aspect of learning
• Breaking the class into pairs or small groups

15
Head-to-Hands

• Carry out a practical application
• Manipulate and test learning
• Helps students maintain motivation towards their
  learning

16
Metacognition in E-Learning

• Sucess of learning environments turns on the
  dynamic relation between learner and environment
• How well students interact with their environment
• How well they read documents
• How well they explore concepts, facts,
  illustrations
• How well they monitor progress
• How well they accept help

17
Metacognition in E-Learning

• Metacognition is associated with the activities
  and skills related to planning, monitoring,
  evaluating and repairing performance.
• External ressources for help
• Visual design can improve metacognition

18
Metacognition in E-Learning (Kirsh, 2004)

• Metacognition is a type of situated cognition.
• it works by controlling the interaction of person
  and world
• it is a component in the dynamic coupling of
  student and environment
• controlled by biasing what one looks at
• controlled by what one does in a motor sense
• sophisticated, concerned with managing schedules,
  checklists, notes and annotations
• Metacognition is interactive!

19
Metacognition in E-Learning (Kirsh, 2004)

• The rhetoric of metacognition is about internal
  regulation but the practice of designers focuses
  on external resources.
• Metacognition recruits internal processes but
  relies at skills that are oriented to controlling
  outside mechanisms!
• Good visual designs are cognitively efficient.
• The cognitive effort involved in metacognitive
  activity is not different in princible than the
  cognitive effort involved in first order
  cognition.
• The way visual cues are distributed effects the
  cognitive effort required to notice what is
  important.

20
Metacognition in E-Learning (Kirsh, 2004)

• Good visual design supports helpful workflow.
• Learners need to plan, monitor and evluate their
  progress
• In well set up environments students will develop
  expectations of the kind of information to be had
  when engaged in a task, such as solving a
  problem.
• Good visual design is about designing cue
  structure.

21
A Distributed View of Metacognition

• ? Managing ressources
• Processes involved in internal cognitive
  functioning
• Objects and processes in ones immediate
  environment

22
A Distributed View of Metacognition 5 tenets

1. The complexity of deciding what to do next is
   made considerably less complex than the general
   problem of rational choice.
2. Humans lean on environmental structure for
   cognitive support.

23
A Distributed View of Metacognition 5 tenets

1. We are closely coupled causally with our
   environments that cognition is effectively
   distributed over mind and environment.
2. Our close causal coupling holds true at different
   temporal levels.
3. Learners are coordinators locked in a system.

24
A Distributed View of Metacognition

• For students operating in well designed
  environments the activity of maintaining
  coordination, of monitoring, repairing, and
  deciding what to do next may not be a fully
  concious process, and certainly need not require
  attention to ones current internal thinking
  process.

25
A Distributed View of Metacognition

• Cognition is distributed between agent and
  environment
• ? When there is conscious awareness of mental
  activity, the aspect of cognition being attended
  to may be the externalisation of that thought.

26
Cognitively Effective Design

• Principles of good pedagogy
• Providing cues, prompts, hints, indicators and
  reminders
• The manner of displaying them has an effect on
  how and when students notice them.

27
Cognitively Effective Design
28
Cognitively Effective Design

• The effectiveness of a structure or process
  measures the probability that subjects will
  comprehend, perceive, extract the meaning, or use
  the structure correctly.
• a) use the interface, hence not reject it
  outright as being too complex to be useful
• b) use the display to obtain the result the users
  want because the display makes it easier to
  understand the options and their relations better

29
Personal Learning Management (Foroughi , 2005)

• The organizer
• Information on self progress
• Search tool for suitable content and assessment
  modules
• Emulating presence through a talking avatar

30
Blooming E-Learning

• Adapting Blooms Taxonomy into the content of
  e-learning course to promote life long learning
  through Metacognition.
• University of Dublin
• Trinity College

31
Blooming E-Learning

• E-learning course developed as a web site
• Introduction to HTML
• Skills and knowledge to produce a web site
• Recognise current metacognitive skills and
  enhance them
• Blooms taxonomy
• Metacognitive instructional approaches

32
Blooming E-Learning

• Blooms taxonomy (Bloom, 1956)
• Can be used as a means by which teachers and
  students can be introduced to metacognition.

33
Blooming E-Learning

• E-Learning course
• 6 chapter
• Each chapter incorporates one of Blooms
  educational objectives
• Each chapter incorporates one of the
  metacognitive instructional approaches by
  Macpherson (2002)
• Metacognitive explanation
• Scaffolded instruction
• Cognitive choaching
• Head to Hands
• Co-operative learning

34
Blooming E-Learning

• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Content displayed as web pages
• Bloom knowledge
• Exercise recall
• Chapter 2 - Text
• Learners can enter text, format it into headings,
  paragraphs, lists, etc.
• Bloom comprehension
• Exercise Hot Potatoes

35
Blooming E-Learning

• Chapter 3 - Links
• Add links to page
• Bloom application
• Exercise create web page
• Metacognitive explanation
• Chapter 4 Images
• Insert images
• Bloom analysis
• Exercise view an existing web page and pick out
  the elements and tags that make it up
• Co-operative learning

36
Blooming E-Learning

• Chapter 5 Tables
• Bloom synthesis
• Exercise Link two web pages
• Heads-to-Hand
• Chapter 6 Forms and Design
• Bloom evaluation
• Exercise create a form and add some elements
• Scaffold instruction

37
Blooming E-Learning

• Evaluation
• Metacognitive knowledge monitoring assessment
  (Tobias Everson, 1996)
• Predication for success with actual successful
  performance
• Predication for failure with actual unsuccessful
  performance
• Predication for failure with actual successful
  performance
• Predication for success with actual unsuccessful
  performance

38
Blooming E-Learning

• Lack of measures for general megacognition
• ? Reduced the overall assessment to the
  metacognitive strategies

39
Blooming E-Learning

• Course incorporated metacognitive skills
• Content received good feedback
• Benefit, helped learn HTML

40
Resources

• http//interactivity.ucsd.edu/articles/Metacogniti
  on/Elearning10.pdf
• https//www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/mscitedu/mite_wrk/re
  sources/portfolios/2001/doyle_e/Final.rtf
• http//fie.engrng.pitt.edu/fie2005/papers/1321.pdf
  
• http//www.learningcircuits.org/2003/oct2003/dobro
  volny.htm
• Schwartz, N.H., Andersen, C., Hong, N., Howard,
  B., McGee, S. (2004). The influence of
  metacognitive skills on learners memory of
  information in a hypermedia environment. Journal
  of Educational Computing Research, 31, 7793.

41

• Thank You For Your Attention