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Metacognition — in Design and Education

I recommend first reading the summary` of this page.

Metacognition

Thinking is cognition.  When you ask “how can I think more effectively?” and you think about thinking — with the objective of improving the quality of your thinking, learning, and performing — this is meta-cognition, because it's your cognition about cognition.

Cognition-and-Metacognition

These two aspects of thinking — cognition, metacognition — are closely related and often overlap, so we can design strategies for using cognition-and-metacognition together in combinations that are mutually supportive and synergistically productive.  But despite these interactions, sometimes it can be useful to think about the special characteristics of either cognition or metacognition, and how to more effectively use each.  But even though for simplicity I'll often refer to metacognition, typically the real meaning is a blending of metacognition-and-cognition.

The Value of Metacognition

Those who study metacognition (educators, psychologists,...) think it can be very useful:  quoting from overviews of metacognition, "an awareness of the learning process [with metacognition] can improve learning dramatically" (Carleton College), and "the ability to appropriately allocate cognitive resources [by using metacognition]... is central to intelligence" (Jennifer Livingston), and "students who demonstrate a wide range of metacognitive skills perform better on exams and complete work more efficiently" (Wikipedia).

One of the "three core learning principles" in How People Learn is metacognition because "integration of metacognitive instruction with discipline-based learning can enhance student achievement and develop in students the ability to learn independently" so "it should be consciously incorporated into curricula across disciplines and age levels." (page 21)   {more about the value of metacognition}

Metacognitive Strategies — for Design and Education

Here are two related strategies — applied in the contexts of general Design Projects, and special projects in Personal Education — for using a process of design (and a model of Design Process) to improve the quality of cognition-and-metacognition and achieve better results:

• metacognitive Coordination Strategies for Design Projects

Design Process has 10 modes of thinking-and-action` including one to coordinate the process of design so you can make effective Action-Decisions.  How?  While you are designing, you observe the process of design, and evaluate your options for “what to do next” (by considering both urgency and importance, asking “what is the best use of my time right now?”) so you can make an Action-Decision and choose an action to do now, which occasionally is a planning of longer-term actions.  When you develop Coordination Strategies to guide you in making decisions about actions, "knowing the conditions-of-application when a skill (or idea) can be useful" because this conditional knowledge lets you "find a match between the demands of your current problem-solving situation (WHAT needs doing now) and your capabilities (HOW to get things done) so you can choose productive design-actions that will help you solve the problem."

In a process of design, you want effective thinking-and-action within each mode, and beneficial interactions between modes.  For example, a generation of options for a problem-solution can occur when creative Generation is stimulated (by using metacognitive strategies) in ways that make this mode more effective, and also when creative Generation is guided (by using critical Evaluation) in a productive creative-and-critical interaction between the modes of Generation and Evaluation.

• metacognitive Learning Strategies for Personal Education

When anyone, including a student, wants to learn more effectively, they take control of their personal education` with a proactive problem-solving attitude, trying to "make things better" by improving their ideas-and-skills knowledge.  One valuable component of Personal Education is developing better cognitive-and-metacognitive Strategies for Learning.

Students can use a process of design to develop-and-apply Strategies for Learning:  they choose an area to improve, and then use a cyclic process of design with evaluative Quality Checks (for learning strategies) and Quality Controls (for applications of learning strategies) to improve the quality of their learning, thinking, and performing.  These improvements are the direct benefits.  An indirect benefit is that when students use a design process to develop Learning Strategies, they are improving design skills that they can use for other design projects in many areas of life, because we use design for almost everything in life.

Teachers should motivate students to develop-and-apply Strategies for Learning, and help them do this more effectively.  And, using a similar process of design, teachers develop their Strategies for Teaching.  In an effort to improve all of the Learning Activities they use for instruction — which can include Design Activities in which students do Design-Inquiry and/or Science-Inquiry — teachers use “external” metacognition (empathetic metacognition)* by “thinking about thinking” while asking themselves, “what are students thinking? how? why?”, as a basis for then asking “how can I design instruction that will help students think-and-learn more effectively?” or for making real-time decisions, during instruction, about guiding students (by asking or answering questions, giving clues,...) and providing formative feedback.  Teachers also develop-and-apply their own personal Strategies for Learning, and they benefit from the mutually supportive interactions between their Learning Strategies and Teaching Strategies.    /    * Although empathetic metacognition (my own term) is not really metacognition, it's analogous and it can provide some similar benefits.

Metacognitive Knowledge

Your use of metacognition, for Coordination Strategies or Learning Strategies, usually will improve when you "build a strong foundation of generalized metacognitive knowledge [about persons, tasks, strategies]... and personally customize this knowledge by ‘knowing yourself’ based on observations of yourself (as the person) in the context of various tasks using different strategies."

Performing and/or Learning and/or Enjoying

For this section, as with all others, I recommend first reading the overview-summary — because it's shorter, yet it contains a new idea (how "the thrill of victory" strengthens a focus on performing rather than learning) — and then read what is below, which includes illustrations you may find interesing and useful.

Should you use different thinking-and-actions during a basketball practice and a championship game?  Why?  We'll return to these questions later, after looking at the learning-and-performing of another kind of skill.

A friend became an expert welder` by using a Strategy for Learning.  How?  He continually improved by following the wise advice of his teacher, “every time you do a job, do it better than the time before.”  But... this advice can be interpreted-and-applied in different ways, to produce different attitudes and strategies.  Here are some principles for combining short-term and long-term priorities, for improving the quality of your performing and/or learning:

When you're doing a job that is important (or you're motivated by competitive pride) and you want to have maximum performance now, you're on-task with a Performance Objective.  If your goal is top performance, you should always focus on quality of thinking-and-action performance in the present, which sometimes involves metacognitively asking “how can I do it better” and “what have I learned in the past that will help me now?”

But at other times — when you want maximum learning now so you can have improved maximum performance later — you are on-task with a Learning Objective (Education Objective) and you may want to metacognitively ask “what can I learn now that will help me perform better in the future?”  An attitude of “learning from present experience, for the future” is useful for transfers of learning.

The main difference between these two objectives is the balance between priorities, in wanting excellent short-term performance now and/or long-term performance with continuing excellence that improves in the future.  Another difference is the balance of focusing on two ways to learn from experience, by using past learning for the present, and using present learning for the future.

Understanding the distinction between learning and performance is important for effective On-and-Off Regulation of Metacognition (below) and (above) for Learning Strategies and for closely related Teaching Strategies that distinguish between the "external metacognition" of evaluation-based formative feedback (used to help students learn in a classroom, for their education, analogous to a preparatory basketball practice) and the feedback of summative evaluation (to measure present performance, as in an important exam, or a competitive basketball game).

For balance and perspective, you'll want to include an Enjoyment Objective, so...

a Total Objective will be a blending of Performance, Education, and Enjoyment.  Or, with action-verbs, you want to perform and/or learn and/or enjoy.

In each "and/or", the AND is a reminder that you can achieve two or more objectives simultaneously, when you learn well and perform well and enjoy.  For example, focusing on peak performance now can help you learn how to improve performance in the future.  The OR is a recognition that, at least for Performing and Learning, sometimes you cannot maximize both, so you must set priorities.

In a personal example of conflict between Present Performance and Future Performance, a wise tennis coach persuaded me to accept a short-term decrease in performance to gain a long-term increase.  Similar conflicts can occur in other situations (e.g. when we use video games for education and we try to teach principles of problem solving), as discussed in Tennis and Other Games.

Due to the interactions of Performance and/or Learning (with a blend of priorities for each), instead of Strategies for Learning you may find it more useful to think in terms of Strategies for Performing-and-Learning or Strategies for Learning-and-Performing.   {or Strategies for Performing-and-Learning-and-Enjoying with "Enjoying" added, as suggested by Timothy Gallwey, author of "Inner Game" books.}

Regulating Metacognition — On and Off

On by Using Metacognition:  Sometimes you'll want to stimulate productivity by using strategies to improve the quality of your thinking-and-actions, or by deciding what to do next.

Off by Avoiding Metacognition:  But at other times, when ideas are flowing smoothly in ways that are intuitive and spontaneous, usually you should just go with the flow and “let it happen.”  When a process of problem solving (or reading, writing, listening,...) is going well, don’t think about thinking, just think.  By doing this, you allow productive thinking.

On-and-Off by Regulating Metacognition:  How can you decide when to use metacognition (to think about process, plans, and strategies), and when to avoid it so you can focus on what you're doing?  If you increase your general knowledge about principles of cognition-and-metacognition, and your personal knowledge about yourself in the contexts of various situations, this knowledge (general and personal) will help you make wise decisions about on-and-off metacognition.

Here are some thoughts about effective regulation of metacognition.

Opportunities for Metacognition:  When you're not deeply engaged in a flow of productive thinking-and-action, this interlude can be a good time to ask “what should I do next, and how?” to coordinate your actions and stimulate your thinking.  For example,

Timings of Preparation-and-Production:  While you are writing a paper, you begin an action-decision` by asking “what should I do now?”  Maybe you need to learn more about the topic by preparing, by doing research to build a stronger foundation of knowledge that will help you generate ideas worth sharing in your paper.  Or maybe you already know enough, and the best use of your time is to work on writing the paper.

Using Intuition Wisely:  At a time when you have options for what to do next, which option-for-action do you find most emotionally appealing?  If you do this action, will you be more motivated to do it well?  Is your feeling an indication that, at an intuitive level, you think this action will be the best use of your time?  Maybe.  Or are you taking “an easy way out” by avoiding other actions that you should do, that might be more productive although less fun?  Maybe.  If you are procrastinating to avoid a high-priority project (or part of a project) even though it is urgent and/or important, you should ask “why?” and design a strategy to Avoid Procrastination and Use Your Time Effectively.

Know Yourself:  A key principle of metacognition is developing the valuable metacognitive skill of knowing yourself (and your situations) well enough to know when to use metacognition, and how to use it, so it will be optimally beneficial. 

Learning and/or Performance:  Generally, metacognition tends to be useful for learning, but sometimes not for performance.  And sometimes reducing both cognition and metacognition (except for a “body awareness” or “situation awareness”) can be useful, especially for skills that are mainly-physical, as in some situations for art (music, dancing,...) and athletics.  I claim that the typical goal of a Learning Strategy (which can be viewed as a Learning-and-Performing Strategy) is "to improve the quality of learning, thinking, and performing" because thinking (with some blend of cognition & metacognition) often is used for learning and performing;  but not always.

Skillful Metacognition:  In situations where metacognition is unproductive — if there is too much introspection of the wrong kind with the wrong timing — the difficulty is not metacognition, it's unskillful metacognition, due to a deficiency in skillfully regulating metacognition.

Skillful Performance

This table shows factors that influence performance:*

To increase a level of Actual Performance, you want to increase Potential Performance — which depends on Abilities (inherited & developed) and Preparation (for the Performance-Situation) — and decrease Distracting Interference (mental, emotional, or physical).  An effective regulation of metacognition, for a particular Situation, turns it on (when it will improve Potential Performance) and off (when it would be a Distracting Interference).

* The concept of "Performance = Potential – Interference" comes from "Inner Game" educational perspectives — begun by Timothy Gallwey (and further developed by John Whitmore,...) who also has useful insights about Performing-Learning-Enjoying — that, along with other useful ideas, are examined more deeply in Optimal Performance: Regulating Cognition-and-Metacognition to produce better Thinking for Learning and/or Performing and/or Enjoying.

MORE - Principles of Metacognition (with links to pages by many authors)

We can learn from experience in the Greatest Seminar on Earth, described by Tim Gallwey in The Inner Game of Work (2000) with introduction on pages 88-89 and "what to learn" & "how to learn" on 94-95-96-97.   What to learn? important objectives are QUEST - Qualities, Understanding, Expertise, StrategicThinking, Time.   How to learn? use a cycle of learning - Set-Up, Experience, Debrief,... - to improve your QUEST,   I.O.U. - Later, I'll develop this more thoroughly with fuller descriptions, including quotations.  Until then, you can use the outline above plus the book-pages. BTW, re: the timings of 3 similar cyclic models for learning from experience, I never saw this "inner game" approach until recently (late 2014), long after I had independently developed my model and then discovered the models for Self-Regulated Learning that were developed first, before the similar cyclic models constructed by myself and Gallwey.