Question: Since conducting metacognitive knowledge education in school is necessary but challenging, in what respects do teachers need to be cautious?
Pretz, Naples, and Sternberg (2003) proposed that “knowledge, cognitive processes and strategies, individual differences in ability and dispositions, as well as external factors such as social context” (p. 9 ) are influential factors to the metacognitive processes that are involved in problem solving procedures. Pintrich (2002) added that “Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them. After all, if students do not know of strategy, they will not be able to use it” (p. 2002).
Metacognitive knowledge is gaining incredible attention from researchers and educators because of its influence on cognition processes and learning results. Before reading Pintrich (2002), my understanding of metacognition was that it was how people perceive their own cognitive strategies. I did not relate motivation, self-regulation, or self-efficacy to metacognition. I took some learning strategies courses at the after-school center while I was in high school. They introduced different ways to take notes, build knowledge construction, and memorize information so as to pass the college entrance exam. I was somewhat bored with the class because I felt they did not teach me substantive knowledge. Although their methods appeared enticing, when I went back to class and did homework, I utilized my habitual ways of taking notes and memorizing facts For example, one learning strategy introduced was to create our own symbol system for note-taking during class to save time. I tried this method in my history class, but could not remember what the symbols represented, and sometimes spent too much time creating symbols rather than learning content. Therefore, I abandoned the new learning strategies and maintained my prior study habits.
I agree that metacognition should be taught explicitly. Although I did not change my learning strategies as a result of the class, I did learn that there were different learning strategies and that some of them may be better than mine. I also noticed that some of my classmates did better than I, not because they were brighter but because they used more effective strategies. However, there are some aspects of metacognition education that need to be improved. First, I believe the information and importance of metacognition can be demonstrated to be the early stages of learning. Students can intentionally select the learning strategies that are most suitable to them. Otherwise, once learning habits are established, positively or negatively, it is considerably harder to change them. As James (1962) said, “we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous” (p. 34). Second, learning metacognitive knowledge in a separate course is not as attractive to students, because isolating strategies independent of context may make the strategies appear abstract and vacuous to students. Not all students can make the connection between the strategies and their own classes and learning. “It is more important that metacognitive knowledge is embedded within the usual content-driven lessons in different subject areas” (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223). If students have opportunities to practice effective strategies for different subjects under their teachers’ supervision, these metacognitive knowledge processes will be more deeply rooted in their cognition systems. Lastly, teachers need to pay attention to students’ individual differences. There is no one optimal strategy for all students in all subject areas. Teaching students to learn varying strategies for different content areas is a much preferred method.
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