Personal Characteristics Necessary for Metacognition

By Lauren Scharff, Ph.D., U. S. Air Force Academy *

At my institution we have created the Science of Learning Team, a group of students who learn about the science of learning (including metacognition) and then lead seminars for other students who are hoping to improve their academic success. Additionally, as part of an ongoing scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project, a small group of us (faculty and students) has assessed the efficacy of our various efforts to disseminate the science of learning to both faculty and students.

Students attending a seminar — Students attending a science of learning seminar

This past academic year I had the pleasure of working with Troy Mather, a senior who joined both the Science of Learning Team and the SoTL project effort as his capstone project. Below are some of his final reflections regarding his experiences helping develop his peers’ metacognition and learning skills. I believe they provide some great insights regarding the personal characteristics necessary for metacognition. He also shares some personal applications that many of us might use as a model as we work to develop metacognition in our students.

What is metacognition and why is it important?

My personal definition for metacognition is having the awareness to self- regulate your learning approaches through modifications or corrections. Having the awareness to identify what you need to work on or change gives you the opportunity to grow. It does require modesty and humbleness to look at yourself and be motivated to change something you see as an area for growth. If you are someone like me, who isn’t someone naturally gifted with academics, metacognition is a tool that you can use to guide your growth as a student and learner.

What is the biggest challenge to developing student metacognition skills?

The biggest challenge I see with developing student metacognition skills is the fact that this skill is largely correlated with maturity. Time is a limiting factor because developing self-regulation doesn’t happen overnight. This makes teaching metacognition hard because you can tell others the definition of the concept and why it is important, but you can’t make them internalize the importance or change their behaviors. However, I have seen that most students eventually figure it out with time and maturity.

How can we overcome this challenge?

Something I found to help students get on that track of appreciating metacognition is by providing some personal examples of ways I have self-regulated my learning approaches and made clear improvements. Students listen to those moments of success and often feel more willing to make changes or even become more aware of what they should work on. Sometimes this goes outside of the academic environment. For example, one of the ways I have been most impacted by metacognition is with my training to be selected for Special Tactics/ Combat Rescue following my graduation.¹
I told my students in our Science of Learning seminars that my training experience was a journey of self-reflection and deep accountability. Every day I had to have the self-awareness and honesty to identify my weak areas and do something about it. Some days I didn’t want to drown in the pool. Some days I didn’t want to run a marathon. And some days doing thousands of body weight exercises when I was already sore was a miserable thought. But, I pushed myself to do those things everyday because I knew if I didn’t, I wouldn’t reach my goal. I got a professional free- dive instructor and a track coach to help me with my training regimen. It was metacognition that allowed me to see areas to improve and reach out for resources.
With academics, students need to take advantage of all the resources they have in front of them. But, this requires self-accountability to make those identifications and be willing to put in that extra work. I told our students about my experience training for Special Operations because they hopefully saw someone with high ambitions and the willingness to put in the work. Every once in a while, learners need a motivational story to put them on track to accomplish their own goals. I have learned that metacognition is the start to achieving any level of greatness.

Using Troy’s Examples

Troy mentions humbleness and self-honesty as underlying characteristics of successful engagement in metacognition. That is not an aspect of metacognition that I have seen widely discussed, but it’s a great insight. It can be uncomfortable acknowledging aspects of our own efforts that have not been successful, and then examining them closely enough to come up with alternate strategies. This discomfort is especially strong if the alternate strategies appear to require more effort, and we’re not certain that they will lead us to success.

Many of our students face these uncomfortable moments on their path to become better learners. Perhaps we can help them through these uncomfortable barriers by more openly acknowledging the discomfort in facing one’s shortcomings, and letting students know that they are not alone in experiencing discomfort. Motivational stories such as the one Troy shared can help ease the resistance to being metacognitive. I’m sure we can all come up with a personal story or two that illustrate our own experiences as developing learners in some realm. Hopefully we can move past our discomfort in sharing our struggles in order to motivate our students to face their own struggles and self-regulate to move beyond them.

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¹ Special Tactics/ Combat Rescue is an elite team within the Special Operations career field of the Air Force.

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.

Metacognition in Psychomotor Development and Positive Error Cultures

Ed Nuhfer, Retired Professor of Geology and Director of Faculty Development and Director of Educational Assessment, enuhfer@earthlink.net, 208-241-5029

All of us experience the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. This state occurs when we truly do know something, such as the name of a person, but we cannot remember the person’s name at a given moment. The feeling that we do know is a form of metacognitive awareness that confirms the existence of a real neural network appropriate to the challenge. It is also an accurate knowing that carries confidence that we can indeed retrieve the name given the right memory trigger.

In “thinking about thinking” some awareness of the connection between our psychomotor domain and our efforts to learn can be useful. The next time you encounter a tip-of-the-tongue moment, try clenching your left hand. Ruth Propper and colleagues confirmed that left hand clenching activates the right hemisphere of the brain and can enhance recall. When learning names, clenching of the right hand activates the left hemisphere and can enhance encoding (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062474). Not all connections between the psychomotor domain and intellectual development are this direct, but it is very useful to connect efforts to develop intellectually with established ways that promote psychomotor development.

Young people are active, so many things that excite them to initiate their learning have a heavy emphasis on psychomotor development. Examples are surfing, snowboarding, dance, tennis, martial arts, yoga, or a team sport. We can also include the hand-eye coordination and learning patterns involved in many addictive video games as heavy on kinesthetic learning, even though these do not offer health benefits of endurance, strength, flexibility, balance, etc. It is rare that anyone who commits to learning any of these fails to achieve measurably increased proficiency.

K-12 teacher Larry Ferlazzo uses the act of missing a wastebasket with a paper wad to help students understand how to value error and use it to inform strategies for intellectual development (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/10/31/an-effective-five-minute-lesson-on-metacognition). His students begin to recognize how the transfer of practices that they already accept as valid from their experiences may likely improve their mastery in less familiar challenges during intellectual development.

College teachers also know that the most powerful paths to high-level thinking engage the psychomotor domain. Visualization that involves explaining to self by diagram and developing images of the knowledge engages psychomotor skills. Likewise, writing engages the psychomotor in developing text, tracking and explaining reasoning and in revising the work (Nuhfer, 2009, 2010 a, b).

Students already “get” that many trips down the ski trail are needed to master snowboarding; they may not “get” that writing many evaluative argument papers is necessary to master critical thinking. In the former, they learn from their most serious error and focus on correcting it first. They correctly surmise that the focused effort to correct one troublesome issue will be beneficial. In efforts to develop intellectually, students deprived of metacognitive training may not be able to recognize or prioritize their most serious errors. This state deprives them of awareness needed to do better on subsequent challenges.

It is important for educators to recognize how particular cultures engage with error. Author and neuroscientist Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Harding Center for Risk Literacy (2014) contrasts positive and negative error cultures. A positive error culture promotes recognition and understanding of error. They discuss error openly, and sharing of experienced error is valued as a way to learn. This culture nurtures a growth mindset in which participants speak metacognitively to self in terms of: “Not yet… change this …better next time.” Gigerenzer cites aviation as a positive error culture of learning that has managed to reduce plane crashes to one in ten million flights. Interestingly, the cultures of surfing, snowboarding, dance, tennis, martial arts and yoga all promote development through positive error cultures. Positive error cultures make development through practice productive and emotionally safe.

Gigerenzer cites the American system of medical practice as one example of a negative error culture, wherein systems of reporting, discussing and learning from serious errors are nearly nonexistent. Contrast aviation safety with the World Heath Organization report that technologically advanced hospitals harm about 10% of their patients. James (2013) deduced that hospital error likely causes over 400,000 deaths annually (http://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/09000/A_New,_Evidence_based_Estimate_of_Patient_Harms.2.aspx). Negative error cultures make it unsafe to discuss or to admit to error and therefore, they are ineffective learning organizations. In negative error cultures, error discovery results in punishment. Negative error cultures nurture fear and humiliation and thereby make learning unsafe. Error there delivers the metacognitive declaration, “I failed.”

We should think in what ways our actions in higher education support positive or negative error cultures and what kinds of metacognitive conversations we nurture in participants (colleagues, students) of the culture. We can often improve intellectual development through understanding how the positive error cultures promote psychomotor development.

References

Gigerenzer, G. (2014) Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions. New York New York: Penguin.

Nuhfer, E.B. (2009) “A Fractal Thinker Designs Deep Learning Exercises: Learning through Languaging. Educating in Fractal Patterns XXVIII, Part 2.” The National Teaching & Learning Forum, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 8-11.

Nuhfer, E.B. (2010a) “A Fractal Thinker Designs Deep Learning Exercises: Acts of Writing as “Gully Washers”- Educating in Fractal Patterns XXVIII, Part 3.” The National Teaching & Learning Forum, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 8-11.

Nuhfer, E.B. (2010b) “A Fractal Thinker Designs Deep Learning Exercises: Metacognitive Reflection with a Rubric Wrap Up – Educating in Fractal Patterns XXVIII, Part 4.” The National Teaching & Learning Forum, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 8-11.

The relationship between goals, metacognition, and academic success

In this article Savia Countinho investigates the relationship between mastery goals, performance goals, metacognition (using the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory), and academic success.

Countinho, S. (2007). The relationship between goals, metacognition, and academic success. Educate. 7(1), p. 39-47

Breaking the Content Mold: The Challenge of Shaping Student Metacognitive Development

by Dr. Lauren Scharff, U. S. Air Force Academy

We all know that it’s difficult to break long-term patterns of behavior, even when we’re genuinely motivated and well intentioned. It becomes significantly more difficult when we are trying to shift behavioral patterns of groups. This is true across a spectrum of situations and behaviors, but in this post I will focus on teachers and students shifting from a focus on content and basic skills to a focus on higher-level thinking and metacognitive skills.

These musing on “breaking the content mold” have become much more salient as I look forward to a new semester and I exchange ideas with colleagues about how we will approach our upcoming classes. I refer to the “content mold” as a way of illustrating how we, both students and teachers, have been shaped, or molded, by many years of prior experiences and expectations. Due to this shaping, the natural default for both groups is to teach or learn in ways that we have been exposed to in the past, especially if those approaches have seemed successful in the past. For many of us, this default is a focus on content and on disciplinary skills closely linked with the content. With conscious effort we can break out of that molded pattern of behavior to encourage interdisciplinary thinking and higher-level thinking skills that transfer beyond our course. However, when things get tough (e.g. when there are time constraints, high cognitive load situations, or pressures to achieve success as portrayed by exam scores), we tend to revert back to the more familiar patterns of behaviors, which for many of us means a focus on content and basic skills, rather than the use of higher-level thinking or metacognitive strategies.

Similarly, in an earlier post on this site, Ed Nuhfer points out that, “When students learn in most courses, they engage in a three-component effort toward achieving an education: (1) gaining content knowledge, (2) developing skills (which are usually specific to a discipline), and (3) gaining deeper understanding of the kinds of thinking or reasoning required for mastery of the challenges at hand. The American higher educational system generally does best at helping students achieve the first two. Many students have yet to even realize how these components differ, and few ever receive any instruction on mastering Component 3.”

One of the biggest challenges to breaking this molded pattern is that it will be far more likely to be successful if both the teacher and the student are genuinely engaged in the effort. No matter how much effort is put forth by an instructor, if value is not perceived by the student, then little change will occur. Similarly, even if a student has learned the value of higher-level thinking and metacognitive approaches, if a teacher doesn’t seem to value those efforts, then a student will astutely focus on what does seem to be valued by the teacher. A further challenge is that, over the course of a semester, the effort and motivation from both groups might wax and wane in a non-synchronous manner. As I explore these challenges, I will use myself and my less-than-successful efforts last semester as an example.

I taught an upper-level majors course in vision science, and because I have taught this course many times, I knew going in that the material is often unexpectedly challenging to students and most of them find the chapter readings to be difficult. (They contain a lot of brain biology and neural communication topics, and my students are not biology majors). Thus, I decided to build in a low-threat (with a small number of points), intentional, metacognitive reflection assignment for each lesson that had a reading. Students would indicate their level of reading completion (six levels encompassing a thorough reading with annotations, skimming, not at all) and their level of understanding of the material before class. If they had problems with any of the materials, they were supposed to indicate what steps they would take to develop understanding. They would record these and turn them in at mid-semester and at the end of the semester. I had hoped that this regular reflection would prompt their awareness of their reading behaviors and their level of learning from the reading, initiate proactive behaviors if they had poor understanding, and build habits by being completed regularly. I also took time at the start of the semester to explicitly explain why I was incorporating this regular reflection assignment.

Unfortunately, except for a couple of students, I would rate this assignment as a failure. I don’t believe it did any harm, but I also don’t believe that students used it as intended. Rather, I think most of them quickly and superficially answered the questions just so they could turn in their logs at the two required times. This type of reflection is not something that they have been asked to explicitly do in the majority (all?) of their prior courses, and they already had other strategies that seemed to work for their success in other classes For example, more than half way through the semester one student informed me that it was simply easier and faster to come to the teacher’s office and get reading guide answers (or homework problem solutions in other courses), rather than deeply read and try to figure it out on his own. Thus, if he didn’t understand as he skimmed, he didn’t worry about it. This approach wasn’t working well in my course, but up to that point he’d been very successful, so he persisted in using it (although I stopped answering his questions in my office until he could demonstrate that he’d at least tried to figure them out).

In hindsight, I believe that my actions (or lack of them) also fed into the failure. I assumed that students would bring their questions to class if they had them due to their increased awareness of them and the prompt about what they would do to increase their understanding. Thus, if there were no questions (typically the case), I used the class time to connect the readings with related application examples and demonstrations rather than reiterated what was in the readings. The students seemed engaged in class and showed no indication of specific problems with the readings. Their personal application reflection writing assignments (separate from the reading logs) were fantastic. However, their poor exam performance suggested that they weren’t deeply understanding the content, and I instinctively shifted back to my prior content-focused approaches. I also did not take time in class to directly ask them about their understanding of the readings, what parts they found most challenging, and why.

Thus, although I know I wanted to support the development of student metacognitive skills, and my students also seemed accepting of that goal when I introduced it to them at the beginning of the semester, both groups of us quickly reverted to old content-focused habits that had been “successful” in the past. I am not the first to note the challenges of developing metacognitive skills. For example, Case and Gunstone (2002) state the following, “Many … authors have emphasized that metacognitive development is not easy to foster (e.g., Gunstone & Mitchell, 1998; White, 1998). Projects to enhance metacognition need to be long-term, and require a considerable energy input from both teachers and students.”

So, what will I do in the future? My plans are to more regularly and explicitly engage in discussion of the reading reflection prompts (and other metacognitive prompts) during class. By giving class time to such discussion and bringing the metacognitive processes into the open (rather than keeping them private due to completion outside of class), I hope to indicate the value of the processes and more directly support student exploration of new ways of thinking about learning. Importantly, I hope that this more public sharing will also keep me from falling back to a simple content focus when student performance isn’t what I’d like it to be. Ultimately, metacognitive development should enhance student learning, although it is likely to take longer to play out into changed learning behaviors. I need to avoid the “quick fix” of focusing on content. Thus, I plan to shape a new mold for myself and openly display it my students. We’ll all be more likely to succeed if we are “all in” together.

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Nuhfer, E. (15 July 2014). Metacognition for Guiding Students to Awareness of Higher-level Thinking (Part 1). Improve with Metacognition. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-for-guiding-students-to-awareness-of-higher-level-thinking-part-1/

Case, J. & Gunstone, R. (2002). Metacognitive Development as a Shift in Approach to Learning: An in-depth study. Studies in Higher Education 27(4), p. 459-470. DOI: 10.1080/0307507022000011561

Positive Affective Environments and Self-Regulation

by Steven Fleisher at CSU Channel Islands

Although challenging at times, providing for positive affective experiences are necessary for student metacognitive and self-regulated learning. In a classroom, caring environments are established when teachers not only provide structure, but also attune to the needs and concerns of their students. As such, effective teachers establish those environments of safety and trust, as opposed to merely environments of compliance (Fleisher, 2006). When trust is experienced, learning is facilitated through the mechanisms of autonomy support as students discover how the academic information best suits their needs. In other words, students are supported in moving toward greater intrinsic (as opposed to extrinsic) motivation and self-regulation, and ultimately enhanced learning and success (Deci & Ryan, 2002; Pintrich, 2003).

Autonomy and Self-Regulation

In an academic context, autonomy refers to students knowing their choices and alternatives and self-initiating their efforts in relation to those alternatives. For Deci and Ryan (1985, 2002), a strong sense of autonomy within a particular academic task would be synonymous with being intrinsically motivated and, thus, intrinsically self-regulated. On the other hand, a low sense of autonomy within a particular academic context would be synonymous with being extrinsically motivated and self-regulated. Students with a low sense of autonomy might say, “You just want us to do what you want, it’s never about us,” while students with a strong sense of autonomy might say, “We can see how this information may be useful someday.” The non-autonomous students feel controlled, whereas the autonomous students know they are in charge of their choices and efforts.

Even more relevant to the classroom, Pintrich (2003) reported that the more intrinsically motivated students have mastery goal-orientations (a focus on effort and effective learning strategy use) as opposed to primarily performance goal-orientations (actually a focus on defending one’s ability). These two positions are best understood under conditions of failure. Performance-orientated students see failure as pointing out their innate inabilities, whereas mastery-oriented students see failure as an opportunity to reevaluate and reapply their efforts and strategies as they build their abilities. Thus, in the long run, mastery-oriented students end up “performing” the best academically.

The extrinsically motivated students perceive that the teacher is in charge, and not themselves, as to whether or not they are rewarded for their work. This extrinsic orientation may facilitate performance, however, it can backfire. These students can become unwilling to put forth a full effort for fear of failure or judgment. These students feel a compulsion for performance, which can result in a refusal to try to meet goals. They may come to prefer unchallenging courses, fail, or drop out entirely. On the other hand, students with intrinsic goal-orientations realize that they are in charge of their reasons for acting. Metacognitively, they are aware of their alternatives and strategies and self-regulate accordingly as they apply the necessary effort toward their learning tasks. These students would sense that the classroom provided an environment for exploring the subject matter in relevant and meaningful ways and they would identify how and where to best apply their learning efforts.

Strategies for the Classroom

As with autonomy (minimum to maximum), motivation and self-regulation exist on a continuum (extrinsic to intrinsic), as opposed to existing at one end or the other. Here are a couple of instructional strategies that I have found that support students in their movement toward greater autonomy and intrinsic motivation and self-regulation.

Knowledge surveys, for example, offer a course tool for organizing content learning and assessing student intellectual development (Nuhfer & Knipp, 2003). These surveys consist of questions that represent the breadth and depth of the course, including the main concepts, the related content information, and the different levels of reasoning to be practiced and assessed. I have found that using knowledge surveys to disclose to student where a course is going and why helps them take charge of their learning. This type of transparency helps students discover ways in which their learning efforts are effective.

Cooperative learning strategies (Millis & Cottell, 1998) provide an ideal counterpart to knowledge surveys. Cooperative learning (for instance, working in groups or teaching your neighbor) offers both positive learning and positive affective experiences. These learning experiences, between students and between teachers and students support the development of autonomy, as well as intrinsic motivation and self-regulation. For example, when students work together effectively in applications of course content, they come to see through one another’s perspectives the relevance of the material, while gaining competency as well as insights into how to gain that competency. When students are aware, by way of the knowledge surveys, of the course content and levels of reasoning required, and when these competencies and related learning strategies are practiced, reflected upon, and attained, learning and metacognitive learning are engaged.

References

Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum Press.

Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (2002). Handbook of self-determination research. Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press.

Fleisher, S. C. (2006). Intrinsic self-regulation in the classroom. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 10(4), 199-204.

Millis, B. J. & Cottell, P. G. (1998). Cooperative learning for higher education faculty. American Council on Education: Oryx Press.

Nuhfer, E. & Knipp, D. (2003). The knowledge survey: A tool for all reasons. To Improve the Academy, 21, 59-78.

Pintrich, P. R. (2003). Motivation and classroom learning. In W. M. Reynolds & G. E. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Educational psychology, Volume 7. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Who says Metacognition isn’t Sexy?

By Michael J. Serra at Texas Tech University

This past Sunday, you might have watched “The 87th Academy Awards” (i.e., “The Oscars”) on television. Amongst the nominees for the major awards were several films based on true events and real-life people, including two films depicting key events in the lives of scientists Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and Alan Turing (The Imitation Game).

There are few things in life that I am sure of, but one thing I can personally guarantee is this: No film studio will ever make a motion picture about the life of your favorite metacognition researcher. Believe it or not, the newest issue of Entertainment Weekly does not feature leaked script details about an upcoming film chronicling how J. T. Hart came up with the idea to study people’s feelings of knowing (Hart, 1967), and British actors are not lining up to depict John Flavell laying down the foundational components for future theory and research on metacognition (Flavell, 1979). Much to my personal dismay, David Fincher hasn’t returned my calls regarding the screenplay I wrote about that time Thomas Nelson examined people’s judgments of learning at extreme altitudes on Mt. Everest (Nelson et al., 1990).

Just as film studios seem to lack interest in portraying metacognition research on the big screen, our own students sometimes seem uninterested in anything we might tell them about metacognition. Even the promise of improving their grades sometimes doesn’t seem to interest them! Why not?

One possibility, as I recently found out from a recent blog post by organic-chemistry professor and tutor “O-Chem Prof”, is that the term “metacognition” might simply not be sexy to our students (O-Chem Prof, 2015). He suggests that we instead refer to the concept as “sexing up your noodle”.

Although the idea of changing the name of my graduate course on the topic to “PSY 6969: Graduate Seminar in Sexing-up your Noodle” is highly tempting, I do not think that the problem is completely one of branding or advertising. Rather, regardless of what we call metacognition (or whether or not we even put a specific label on it for our students), there are other factors that we know play a crucial role in whether or not students will actually engage in self-regulated learning behaviors such as the metacognitive monitoring and control of their learning. Specifically, Pintrich and De Groot (1990; see Miltiadou & Savenye, 2003 for a review) identified three major factors that determine students’ motivation to learn that I suggest will also predict their willingness to engage in metacognition: value, expectancy, and affect.

The value component predicts that students will be more interested and motivated to learn about topics that they see value in learning. If they are struggling to learn a valued topic, they should be motivated to engage in metacognition to help improve their learning about it. A wealth of research demonstrates that students’ values and interest predict their motivation, learning, and self-regulation behaviors (e.g., Pintrich & De Groot, 1990; Pintrich et al., 1994; Wolters & Pintrich, 1998; for a review, see Schiefele, 1991). Therefore, when students do not seem to care about engaging in metacognition to improve their learning, it might not be that metacognition is not “sexy” to them; it might be that the topic itself (e.g., organic chemistry) is not sexy to them (sorry, O-Chem Prof!).

The expectancy component predicts that students will be more motivated to engage in self-regulated learning behaviors (e.g., metacognitive control) if they believe that their efforts will have positive outcomes (and won’t be motivated to do so if they believe their efforts will not have an effect). Some students (entity theorists) believe that they cannot change their intelligence through studying or practice, whereas other students (incremental theorists) believe that they can improve their intelligence (Dweck et al., 1995; see also Wolters & Pintrich, 1998). Further, entity theorists tend to rely on extrinsic motivation and to set performance-based goals, whereas incremental theorists tend to rely on intrinsic motivation and to set mastery-based goals. Compared to entity theorists, students who are incremental theorists earn higher grades and are more likely to persevere in the face of failure or underperformance (Duckworth & Eskreis-Winkler, 2013; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Romero et al., 2014; see also Pintrich, 1999; Sungur, 2007). Fortunately, interventions have been successful at changing students to an incremental mindset, which in turn improves their learning outcomes (Aronson et al., 2002; Blackwell et al., 2007; Good et al., 2003; Hong et al., 1999).

The affective component predicts that students will be hampered by negative thoughts about learning or anxiety about exams (e.g., stereotype threat; test anxiety). Unfortunately, past research indicates that students who experience test anxiety will struggle to regulate their learning and ultimately end up performing poorly despite their efforts to study or to improve their learning (e.g., Bandura, 1986; Pintrich & De Groot, 1990; Pintrich & Schunk, 1996; Wolters & Pintrich, 1998). These students in particular might benefit from instruction on self-regulation or metacognition, as they seem to be motivated and interested to learn the topic at hand, but are too focused on their eventual test performance to study efficiently. At least some of this issue might be improved if students adopt a mastery mindset over a performance mindset, as increased learning (rather than high grades) becomes the ultimate goal. Further, adopting an incremental mindset over an entity mindset should reduce the influence of beliefs about lack of raw ability to learn a given topic.

In summary, although I acknowledge that metacognition might not be particularly “sexy” to our students, I do not think that is the reason our students often seem uninterested in engaging in metacognition to help them understand the topics in our courses or to perform better on our exams. If we want our students to care about their learning in our courses, we need to make sure that they feel the topic is important (i.e., that the topic itself is sexy), we need to provide them with effective self-regulation strategies or opportunities (e.g., elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, or interleaved practice questions; see Dunlosky et al., 2013) and help them feel confident enough to employ them, we need to work to reduce test anxiety at the individual and group/situation level, and we need to convince our students to adopt a mastery (incremental) mindset about learning. Then, perhaps, our students will find metacognition to be just as sexy as we think it is.

References

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 113-125. doi:10.1006/jesp.2001.1491

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78, 246-263. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x

Duckworth, A., & Eskreis-Winkler, L. (2013). True Grit. Observer, 26. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/april-13/true-grit.html

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14, 4-58. doi: 10.1177/1529100612453266

Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C. Y., & Hong, Y. Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A world from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267-285. doi: 10.1207/s15327965pli0604_1

Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological Review, 95, 256-273. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.95.2.256

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906

Good, C., Aronson, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2003). Improving adolescents’ standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effect of stereotype threat. Applied Developmental Psychology, 24, 645-662. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2003.09.002

Hart, J. T. (1967). Memory and the memory-monitoring process. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6, 685-691. doi: 10.1016/S0022-5371(67)80072-0

Hong, Y., Chiu, C., Dweck, C. S., Lin, D., & Wan, W. (1999). Implicit theories, attributions, and coping: A meaning system approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 588-599. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.77.3.588

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