The very few people who have attempted to bring up “metacognition” in polite conversation have mostly been met with uncontrolled reactions. Eyes glaze over and mouths get dry. Vague associations with metaphysics and mysticism might be made. The quick-witted excuse themselves to pour another drink.
Is this “flight” reaction well-tuned? Should you be anticipating a metaphysical conversational experience in such rare moments?
No. Metacognition has a different relationship to cognition than metaphysics does to physics.
Cognition and metacognition are closely connected. Cognitive scientists study metacognition as one part of cognition. They increasingly find it to be important. Few physicists seem to feel that way about metaphysics. They tend to want metaphysics to keep its distance.
In an essay and review on metacognitive development, Deanna Kuhn addresses three core issues that help shed some light on metacognition:
- What is metacognition?
- Where does metacognition come from?
- What does metacognition do for us?
Metacognition refers to what you know about your own thinking and learning. It is the part of cognition that monitors other cognitive processes, and makes adjustments to them. Several sources provide other good basic definitions and details:
- Metacognition – dictionary definition
- Wikipedia entry on Metacognition
- Metacognition: An Overview
- Developing Metacognition
As for Kuhn’s conception, there is more than one kind of metacognition. You know about what you know about a topic as one type of metacognition. For example, what do you know about cooking or physics? You can also talk about how you gain knowledge of a subject. Kuhn suggests that awareness of the strategies you use to learn may be the more useful of the two. It’s an interesting idea, though I don’t recall any specific studies that address it. Both are surely important.
Metacognition also applies to more than one kind of cognition. When it first started to be taken at all seriously by cognitive psychologists in the late 1970’s, the research was really just about memory. Researchers tried to figure out a few things. What do people know about how their own memory works? What do people expect they will remember later, and how does that relate to what they really do remember? What mnemonic strategies do they use? Do they make a difference?
Biting off that small chunk of cognition has paid off. The memory researchers learned more about memory by paying attention to its metacognitive aspects. They also learned a lot about what metacognition is, at least as it applies to memory. Metacognition gained some credibility.
Metacognition is now being used more broadly to help understand other aspects of cognition, such as comprehension and reasoning. Our own research has addressed the role of metacognition in decision making, and even in cross-cultural competence.
Scientists who experiment with college student metacognition tend to take it for granted. “There it is, let’s study it. How well does it work, and can we make it better in 20 min?” An implication of Kuhn’s paper is that they are sampling a small sliver of something that develops over years. A person gains greater awareness of their own cognition and can control it more effectively as they mature. Training also helps.
The beginnings of metacognition start early in life. Even young children have some understanding of mind. By age 3, they use words like think and know to talk about what’s in there. By 4 years, kids know that they and other people have beliefs and desires. They can compare what they know with what another knows, and note that beliefs can be wrong.
Kids also start to develop an awareness of how they have come to know something they believe. That is, they start to pay some attention to the sources of their knowledge. The skill of evaluating sources is an essential one for self-directed, adult learning. It’s also a good example of a cognitive skill that only a few people master on their own; yet folks improve on it with training.
Findings like these provide evidence that explicit training and 