SITE TOUR

Bill's audio reflection on his work

(a note about authorship)

An Analysis of How Students Transfer Knowledge of a Specific Concept to a New Problem:

After the Reciprocal Teaching exercise, I use an assignment-- the Flawed Thinking Problem-- that explicitly asks the students to apply their developing understanding of metacognition. (In Spring 1999, I also used this as a pretest of students' understanding.) Because of its theoretical and practical significance, I emphasize metacognition at several points in my educational psychology class. Initially, I introduce metacognition in class as part of lecture and discussion about learning and thinking. Students read a chapter about metacognition, write about it, and discuss it in class. Metacognition is one of the concepts students study and use as they work through the problem.

The purpose is twofold.  One is to further develop students' understanding of this key concept, and second to test students' ability to use the concept in a new situation. I ask the students to complete five episodes of flawed thinking, which present scenarios in which children or adults fail to monitor or regulate their own thinking effectively. Students are asked to explain the basis for the flawed thinking in each episode, and also to explain the phenomenon(a) common to all the episodes. To illustrate, consider one of the episodes, an incident reported by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer (1989).

Once in a department store I handed the cashier a new credit card.  Noticing that I hadn't signed it, she handed it back to me to sign.  Then she took my card, passed it through her machine, handed me the resulting form, and asked me to sign it.  I did as I was told.  The cashier then held the form next to the newly signed card to see if the signatures matched.

There are a variety of common sense explanations for this vignette. One might say the cashier was running on automatic pilot, not paying attention to what she was doing, daydreaming, her mind was elsewhere, and so on. Langer refers to the lapse as an example of mindlessness—a metacognitive lapse in the cashier's awareness of her own mental activity.

"Metacognition" is the capacity to monitor and regulate one's own thinking or mental activity. Research indicates that metacognition plays a key role in learning, and a parallel research literature focuses on how to improve metacognitive abilities (Brown, 1991). Metacognition is an important concept in educational psychology because of its practical implications for teaching and learning (Mayer, 1998; Marshall, 1998). The concept can be a powerful tool for teachers to analyze and overcome difficulties in student learning. Moreover, many argue that metacognition should be an intended outcome of schooling, and that educators should put greater emphasis on the development of more mindful individuals capable of independent, self-regulated learning and thinking.