Think at GC: The Metacognition Project

This journal covers the concept of metacognition and addresses fundamental theoretical issues, measurement issues regarding both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as empirical studies about individual differences in metacognition.

The author offers insights on the importance of developing metacognition, the awareness of one's thought processes, in the practice of podiatry. Topics discussed include the components and subparts of metacognitive knowledge, advice against the use of availability heuristic, definition of base rate fallacy, and occurrence of diagnostic errors due to confirmation bias.

This article considers the cognitive architecture of human meta-reasoning: that is, metacognition concerning one's own reasoning and decision-making. The view we defend is that meta-reasoning is a cobbled-together skill comprising diverse self-management strategies acquired through individual and cultural learning. These approximate the monitoring-and-control functions of a postulated adaptive system for metacognition by recruiting mechanisms that were designed for quite other purposes.

Review by: Dr. Christel Broady
Metacognition, understood as cognition about cognition, involves ‘the theoretical knowledge that one knows, understands, remembers, perceives and so on’ (3), a capacity underwritten by a much more general conceptual ability to attribute mental states such as knowing and perceiving, whether to oneself or others. Proust’s exclusivists, by contrast, see metacognition as something poised above ordinary cognition: this group has focused on the feelings generated by thinking, feelings such as certainty and tip-of-the-tongue states. These feelings seem to have some function connected to monitoring one’s own mental activity, as opposed to being equally applicable to ourselves and others, and Proust argues that they function in a way that does not depend on any prior conceptual ability to attribute mental states. In her view, ‘metacognition’ should be understood as ‘referring exclusively to the capacity of self-evaluating one’s own thinking’; she holds that ‘metacognition is a natural kind: it has a set of functional features of its own, which are independent of those associated with the self-attribution of mental states’ (4). Metacognition in her sense sometimes applies to self-attributed mental states, but it need not always do so: she contends that some metacognitive evaluations are made without any conceptualization of a mental state on the part of the agent, including, for example, evaluations made by animals relatively incapable of mental state attribution. Proust takes metacognition to be ‘based in part on non-analytic, that is, procedural, knowledge (knowing how, rather than knowing that)’

The nature of people's meta-representations of deductive reasoning is critical to understanding how people control their own reasoning processes. We conducted two studies to examine whether people have a metacognitive representation of abstract validity and whether familiarity alone acts as a separate metacognitive cue. In Study 1, participants were asked to make a series of (1) abstract conditional inferences, (2) concrete conditional inferences with premises having many potential alternative antecedents and thus specifically conducive to the production of responses consistent with conditional logic, or (3) concrete problems with premises having relatively few potential alternative antecedents. Participants gave confidence ratings after each inference. Results show that confidence ratings were positively correlated with logical performance on abstract problems and concrete problems with many potential alternatives, but not with concrete problems with content less conducive to normative responses. Confidence ratings were higher with few alternatives than for abstract content. Study 2 used a generation of contrary-to-fact alternatives task to improve levels of abstract logical performance. The resulting increase in logical performance was mirrored by increases in mean confidence ratings. Results provide evidence for a metacognitive representation based on logical validity, and show that familiarity acts as a separate metacognitive cue.

Review by: Dr. Christel Broady
Research on metacognition has revealed the uncomfortable truth that people are rather poor judges of these metacognitive deficiencies are unexplained, the consequences are crystal clear. They result in biased judgements, which impact our metacognitive strategies and which guide our decisions in areas like attendance of continuing professional their own metacognitive knowledge and regulation. It is not just novices, but experts too, who are prone to overconfidence when it comes to their own knowledge and learning. Although the causes of development – a rather tragic vicious circle. When people think they are (not) very good at something and, worse, unable to profit from learning, they are unlikely to make an effort to improve. So for progress in metacognition, we should turn outwards rather than inwards to shore up our own limited metacognitive powers. What sort of feedback, if any, do you usually get on your metacognitive strategies? When was the last time you had a serious conversation about your learning needs or the wisdom of taking part in continuing professional development? The next meeting was quite difficult for student A. He hadn’t been aware of his inaccurate metacognitive knowledge. My colleague helped him to get a better insight in his own study strengths and weaknesses and to change his study strategies.

Several distinct research streams are converging in the field of foreign or second language reading in the U.S. Separate research streams in metacognition, in reading strategies, and in the training of reading strategies are converging in the field of English as a foreign or second language. This confluence of research is dramatically impacting the teaching of English to adult non-native speakers for academic purposes. In this article we will briefly review these distinct research streams for their relevance to the population in question, and will then describe the research design for an empirical study we are currently conducting to further investigate the efficacy of metacognitive strategy training for adult EFL/ESL reading.

Metacognition is increasingly recognized as important to learning. This article describes self-regulatory processes that promote achievement in the basic skills of reading and mathematical problem solving. Self-regulatory behaviors in reading include clarifying one's purpose, understanding meanings, drawing inferences, looking for relationships, and reformulating text in one's own terms. Self-regulatory behaviors in mathematics include clarifying problem goals, understanding concepts, applying knowledge to reach goals, and monitoring progress toward a solution. The article then describes the author's experiences integrating metacognition with reading and mathematics instruction and highlights students' reactions to learning to think metacognitively.

Review by: Dr. Christel Broady
Evidence from dual-process and cognitive behavioral theorists points to the conclusion that the products of associative learning are sometimes available in working memory. Adolescents, adults, and children (to a lesser extent) can engage in meta- cognitive intercession, reflecting on the products of associative processing and deciding whether to assimilate these products to existing knowledge or create new levels of understanding. To highlight my arguments, I discuss research on belief-biased reasoning and an intervention that reduced reasoning biases.
My students and I have recently tried to reduce reasoning biases by borrowing techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy. Specifically, we have tried to cultivate an understanding of how to monitor reasoning and how failure to do so can lead to problems in decision making, acquiring new information, and perpetuating stereotypes. The preliminary findings (only college student adults participated) are intriguing. After assessing biases about issues that activated strong beliefs (e.g., the war in Iraq, gender and science careers), students’ biases were illustrated to them and the pitfalls of failure to monitor reasoning were discussed. Students also rereasoned about the evidence from the perspective of a person with opposing beliefs. Results indicated that reasoning biases about the original evidence and about two transfer issues (e.g., alcohol consumption) decreased significantly. Thus, learning as conceptual change took place, but only under conditions designed to activate metacognitive awareness in multiple ways. Because the intervention episodes were very brief, we believe that what our intervention did not do was instill metacognitive skills that were not, at some level, already present.

Chinese students are more likely than US students to hold a malleable view of success in school, yet are more likely to hold fixed mindsets about intelligence. We demonstrate that this apparently contradictory pattern of cross-cultural differences holds true across multiple samples and is related to how students conceptualize intelligence and its relationship with academic achievement. Study 1 (N > 15,000) confirmed that US students endorsed more growth mindsets than Chinese students. Importantly, US students’ mathematics grades were positively related to growth mindsets with a medium-to-large effect, but for Chinese students, this association was slightly negative. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 findings with US and Chinese college samples, and further discovered that cross-cultural differences in intelligence mindset beliefs corresponded to how students defined intelligence. Together, these studies demonstrated systematic cross-cultural differences in intelligence mindset and suggest that intelligence mindsets are not necessarily associated with academic motivation or success in the same way across cultures.

A large nationwide study has found that teaching ninth graders to maintain a “growth mindset” toward learning—stressing that their minds are like muscles that can get stronger with use—can result in higher test scores.

The study, published today in the journal Nature, is the largest and most rigorous test of whether mindset trainings can improve student performance. The concept is already well-known in education circles, and it has gained national attention thanks to books and TED talks by Carol Dweck, an education professor at Stanford University.

A global priority for the behavioral sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed—improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses in a nationally representative sample of students in secondary education in the United States. Notably, the study identified school contexts that sustained the effects of the growth mindset intervention: the intervention changed grades when peer norms aligned with the messages of the intervention. Confidence in the conclusions of this study comes from independent data collection and processing, preregistration of analyses, and corroboration of results by a blinded Bayesian analysis.

While research on metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies in second language (L2) writing has proliferated, little attention has been paid to metacognitive experiences in learning to write. This study contributes a novel 6-point Likert scale questionnaire, EFL Learners' Writing Metacognitive Experiences Questionnaire (EFLLWMEQ), and reports insights into learners' metacognitive experiences gathered from its use. The questionnaire was designed to investigate, first, the nature of students' metacognitive experiences when they learn to write in English as a foreign language (EFL) and, secondly, the relationship between students' metacognitive experiences and their writing performance. To this end, the questionnaire was developed and validated with two independent samples of 340 and 540 Chinese undergraduates whose metacognitive experiences were measured as they learned to write in EFL. Data were subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), respectively. Findings of EFA and CFA revealed a four-factor structure of students' metacognitive experiences of EFL writing: Metacognitive estimates, metacognitive feelings, online task-specific metacognitive knowledge, and online task-specific metacognitive strategies. Results showed that students' metacognitive experiences had positive correlations with their EFL writing test scores. Importantly, the CFA results from the sample of 540 students supported the four-factor correlated model with the best model fit, confirming the validity and reliability of the EFLLWMEQ. This study has theoretical and pedagogical implications for how learners' metacognitive experiences can be managed in learning to write, particularly in EFL classrooms.