by Craig Nelson, Indiana University

This is my first post for this group. I have two goals. I want to illustrate some ways that we can use metacognition in everyday, non-academic situations. And I want to begin my posts with some reflections that are naïve. Naïve in the sense that I have not digested the work already on the blog and have not turned to the metacognitive literature. This will help me recognize later when other material really challenges my own ideas. We know from work in other contexts that making initial ideas explicit rather than tacit greatly facilitates cognitive change. In the present context, we could say that it activates metacognitive processing tools.

As always, a concrete example will make this clearer. Crouch and her associates (2004) asked “Classroom Demonstrations: Learning Tools or Entertainment?” They found that just doing a demonstration in physics had little effect on students’ understanding. It was simply entertainment. If you had a relevant misconception before the demonstration, you would probably still have it afterwards. Telling someone what is wrong with their misconception or even having them listen to a carefully constructed lecture or read a carefully constructed text is “futile,” their ideas are unlikely to change (Arons, 1976). Crouch et al. tried an alternative method. Before presenting the demonstration they asked students to write down what they thought would happen and then discuss their predictions briefly with their neighbors (thus activating prior conceptions and some relevant cognitive and metacognitive frameworks). Crouch and her associates then presented the demonstration and asked the students to compare what happened to their own predictions and to discuss the comparison with their neighbors. This led to significant conceptual change.

One of the most powerful metacognitive tools is exactly this. Ask yourself what a speaker or article or book or demonstration in class or real life is likely to say or show. Make explicit predictions. Whenever possible write them down. Then monitor the extent to which your predictions work out. Congratulate yourself when you are right and ask why you were wrong when they don’t.

A second powerful general metacognitive tool is related. Ask yourself how you do something. Then ask yourself what are some alternative ways you might do it and how you might decide which one to use in the future. For example: What pattern do you follow when you shop in the grocery store? Do you start with produce or end with produce? What else? How else might you systematically shop? And now the tough part: What criteria might favor each of the patterns? For example: Ending with heavy things such as dog-food might minimize your pushing effort but it might also risk crushing more delicate items. I try to minimize the temptation to buy junk food and processed carbohydrates generally. This means that in the grocery stores I visit, I generally shop the margins (produce, meat, diary) and avoid going through the aisles with canned food, sweets, chips and related foods unless I have something on my list that is found there. The bottom line is that for the things we do and the ways that we think, we should remember to ask, first, what are the alternatives and, second, what do we gain and lose by the ones that we choose.

I will close with two foreshadowings of points I expect to develop much more extensively later. Learning to think is a strange enterprise. Our best thinking at each point has limits that we cannot see and may not even be able to comprehend even if someone points them out to us. Misconceptions are a basic example. It is very hard to avoid taking any contradictory evidence we encounter and distorting it so that it seems to support our initial misconception (Grant, 2009). We have to make predictions or engage in strangely structured discussions (What would it take to convince you to switch to a new view if you held this misconception? Grant, 2009) or otherwise be effectively challenged. Seek out such challenges to even your most seemingly solid ideas.

This inability to see new ways of thinking applies even to the general way we perceive reality. Suppose that you think that knowledge in general and science and math in particular are based on objective truth and is likely to be eternally true. You then might have deep trouble with the titles and core ideas in for example, Kline’s Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Ioannidis’ Why Most Published Research Findings Are False or Freedman’s Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. Even deeper challenges would be presented by, among many others, Anderson’s Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be, or Baxter Magolda’s Authoring Your Life. But each of these implicitly or explicitly presents a metacognitive framework that can be very powerful once we master it. So my final hint today for metacognitive awareness is to play Elbow’s believing game: See if you can understand how an author comes to his or her conclusions even when they seem very different from your own. Or as Russell put it, the rationale for studying the history of philosophy is to understand how an intelligent person ever came to believe such things as a tool for recognizing the limits of one’s own beliefs. We need to do this broadly, not just historically.

 References

Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-To-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. Harpercollins.

Arons, Arnold. Arons, A. B. 1976. Cultivating the capacity for formal operations: Objectives and procedures in an introductory physical science course. American Journal of Physics 44: 834-838.

Baxter Magolda, Marcia B. 2009. Authoring Your Life: Developing an Internal Voice to Navigate Life’s Challenges. Stylus.

Crouch, Catherine H., A. P. Fagen, P. Callan and E. Mazur. 2004. “Classroom Demonstrations: Learning Tools or Entertainment?” American Journal of Physics 72:835-838.

Elbow, Peter. 1973. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press.

Freedman, David. 2010. Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/?single_page=true (or http://bit.ly/11aAmt0).

Grant, B. W. 2009. Practitioner Research Improved My Students’ Understanding Of Evolution By Natural Selection In An Introductory Biology Course. Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, 6(4). http://tiee.ecoed.net/vol/v6/research/grant/abstract.html

Ioannidis, John. 2005. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine August; 2(8): e124. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ (The most downloaded article in the history of PLoS Medicine.)

Kline, Morris. 1982. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Oxford University Press.

Russell, Bertrand. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Schuster.