The pretest provides a rough measure of students' ideas about learning and thinking at the outset of my class. As expected, they used common sense notions about learning to explain the episodes. For example, two of the episodes involve differences between younger and older children. Students tended to explain these in terms of global developmental differences (e.g., younger children do not remember as many pictures as the older ones because their memory is not as developed). Another common reason used to explain some of the episodes was "lack of attention" (e.g., the children do not pay attention to the directions to the card game and therefore do not see the flaws, or the fifth grade boy does not pay attention to the problems and does not see they are related). Some responses zeroed in on aspects of metacognitive activity such as planning, keeping track of things, and self-reflection.

When students completed the exercise again in the eighth week of the semester, they used more specific disciplinary ideas, including metacognition, to explain the learning gaps and lapses depicted in the scenarios. The number of references to metacognition for all five scenarios increased from 57 on the pretest to 90 on the posttest. Eighty-seven percent of the students in the class used metacognition to explain at least one of the episodes. Most students were able to go beyond common sense explanations (e.g., the child was not paying attention) and infer that there was a gap in the child's awareness or regulation of his or her own mental activity.

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