As part of the exercise students had to identify a single phenomenon that explained all five of the episodes. All five episodes depict metacognitive failures. Consider one of the episodes and some examples of students' responses.

ADDITION.  A 5^th grade student worked at the blackboard on the following problem 354 + 249.  After some time he solved it correctly. The teacher then gave him another problem, 354 + 250. He immediately set about doing it, and eventually solved it. Then the teacher gave him a third problem, 354 + 250. Again, the student burrowed in and eventually solved the problem.

In order to explain this episode, one needs to determine why the child overlooked the relationships between the three addition problems. It would be reasonable to expect students to incorporate the idea of metacognition, indicating that the child is unaware of his own thinking, and consequently treats the three addition problems as unrelated experiences. The boy is unaware that he knows something he could use to solve each subsequent problem. In some cases, students did just that.

In addition to answers that used metacognition appropriately, students also produced several other types of responses. One is a purely descriptive answer that restates the episode without explaining it, as in the following example.A third type of answer incorporated a concept from the course incorrectly. The students reached back to what they had learned previously in the course and brought back the "wrong" idea to explain the episode. In the following example, the student uses ideas from one of the course readings about the nature of understanding. A fourth type of response departed from the course material.

The exercise involves far transfer; in effect, students had to reach back to previously-learned material and find a concept offering the best explanation for the episodes. I gave them no cues or clues about which of the ideas were most relevant. Students had to sort through many ideas, some of which seemed relevant. About one third of the students thought "lack of understanding" was the best explanation, and some students made a pretty good case for it.

This exercise illustrates an intermediate step between superficial and deep understanding. As novices in the subject matter, these students are still working on the distinctions among unfamiliar and abstract concepts such as metacognition, understanding, application, transfer, etc. Had I the time, I might have followed up the exercise by asking students to use metacognition to explain all of the episodes. This would provide some evidence about the extent to which students can apply the concept. I chose not to do this, but instead debriefed students on the exercise by posting examples of reasonable "metacognitive" explanations from members of the class.

I think that the poor performances in each situation really go back to the individuals thinking dispositions.  "Dispositions represent a person's tendency to use his/her abilities in particular ways and directions"  (Tishman, Perkins, Jay, The Thinking Classroom, p. 38).  "Simply having an ability does not guarantee one will use it and use it well" (Tishman, Perkins, Jay, The Thinking Classroom, p. 37).  Because these people are overlooking something, I conclude that their thinking dispositions are not developed fully.