Metacognition

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Metacognition

• SE - Current Issues in Technology Enhanced
  Learning
• 24.05.2005
• Monika Pilgerstorfer

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Metacognition

• Thinking about thinking
• (Blakely, 1990 Livingston, 1997)
• Flavell (1977)
• Child cognition
• Developmental changes in
• Metamemory
• Metacomprehension
• Metacommunication

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Metacognition

• Knowledge and active control over ones own
  cognitive processes when engaged in learning
• metacognitive knowledge
• metacognitive regulation

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Metacognitive Knowledge

• Knowledge about human learning and information
  processing
• Knowledge about the learning task at hand and its
  corresponding processing demands
• Knowledge about cognitive and metacognitive
  strategies and their appropriate use

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Metacognitive Regulation

• processes that can be applied in order to control
  cognitive activities and achieve cognitive goals
• planning and monitoring cognitive activities and
  further revision depending on the result of these
  activities

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Elements of Metacognition

• Metamemory
• Knowledge about memory systems and memory
  strategies
• Metacomprehension
• Learners awareness about what he/she knows /
  does not know

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Elements of Metacognition

• Self-regulation
• Learners adjustment to errors
• Covers social interaction
• Schema Training
• Helps learners to develop their own cognitive
  structures from understanding information and
  experiences

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Metacognition

• Students perception of themselves has an impact
  of their performance, achievements and
  self-management of their own learning.
• Metacognition influences the students
  orientation to learning tasks and problem
  solving.
• Performing the task or solving the problem
  influences their belief in their personal and
  academic abilities, therefore metacognition
  allows students to believe in themselves.

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Metacognitive Strategies

• Blakely Spence (1990)
• Connecting new information to former knowledge
• Selecting thinking strategies deliberately
• Planning, monitoring and evaluating thinking
  processes
• ? Utilising these strategies a learner can
  identify a problem, research alternative
  solutions, evaluate and decide on a final
  solution.

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Metacognitive Strategies

• Macpherson (2002)
• Metacognitive explanation
• Scaffolded instruction
• Cognitive choaching
• Head-to-hands
• Co-operative learning

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Metacognitive Explanation

• Involves the teacher
• Talking through the problem, start to ask the
  student for suggestions
• Thinking aloud
• Observing the process of solving a problem

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Scaffolded Instruction

• Exploring problems with little help from the
  teacher
• Teachers role is to support
• Teacher should intervene if the student is
  experiencing difficulties
• What do you think would happen if?
• How can you check to see if you are correct or
  not?

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Cognitive Choaching

• Teacher prompts student from solution
• Students are encouraged to explain what he/she
  did to the other students
• On-going assessment of students performance
• Students are challenged to achieve new goals with
  different levels of difficulty

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Co-operative Learning

• Utilises the social aspect of learning
• Breaking the class into pairs or small groups

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Head-to-Hands

• Carry out a practical application
• Manipulate and test learning
• Helps students maintain motivation towards their
  learning

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Metacognition in E-Learning

• Sucess of learning environments turns on the
  dynamic relation between learner and environment
• How well students interact with their environment
• How well they read documents
• How well they explore concepts, facts,
  illustrations
• How well they monitor progress
• How well they accept help

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Metacognition in E-Learning

• Metacognition is associated with the activities
  and skills related to planning, monitoring,
  evaluating and repairing performance.
• External ressources for help
• Visual design can improve metacognition

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Metacognition in E-Learning (Kirsh, 2004)

• Metacognition is a type of situated cognition.
• it works by controlling the interaction of person
  and world
• it is a component in the dynamic coupling of
  student and environment
• controlled by biasing what one looks at
• controlled by what one does in a motor sense
• sophisticated, concerned with managing schedules,
  checklists, notes and annotations
• Metacognition is interactive!

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Metacognition in E-Learning (Kirsh, 2004)

• The rhetoric of metacognition is about internal
  regulation but the practice of designers focuses
  on external resources.
• Metacognition recruits internal processes but
  relies at skills that are oriented to controlling
  outside mechanisms!
• Good visual designs are cognitively efficient.
• The cognitive effort involved in metacognitive
  activity is not different in princible than the
  cognitive effort involved in first order
  cognition.
• The way visual cues are distributed effects the
  cognitive effort required to notice what is
  important.

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Metacognition in E-Learning (Kirsh, 2004)

• Good visual design supports helpful workflow.
• Learners need to plan, monitor and evluate their
  progress
• In well set up environments students will develop
  expectations of the kind of information to be had
  when engaged in a task, such as solving a
  problem.
• Good visual design is about designing cue
  structure.

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A Distributed View of Metacognition

• ? Managing ressources
• Processes involved in internal cognitive
  functioning
• Objects and processes in ones immediate
  environment

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A Distributed View of Metacognition 5 tenets

• The complexity of deciding what to do next is
  made considerably less complex than the general
  problem of rational choice.
• Humans lean on environmental structure for
  cognitive support.

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A Distributed View of Metacognition 5 tenets

• We are closely coupled causally with our
  environments that cognition is effectively
  distributed over mind and environment.
• Our close causal coupling holds true at different
  temporal levels.
• Learners are coordinators locked in a system.

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A Distributed View of Metacognition

• For students operating in well designed
  environments the activity of maintaining
  coordination, of monitoring, repairing, and
  deciding what to do next may not be a fully
  concious process, and certainly need not require
  attention to ones current internal thinking
  process.

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A Distributed View of Metacognition

• Cognition is distributed between agent and
  environment
• ? When there is conscious awareness of mental
  activity, the aspect of cognition being attended
  to may be the externalisation of that thought.

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Cognitively Effective Design

• Principles of good pedagogy
• Providing cues, prompts, hints, indicators and
  reminders
• The manner of displaying them has an effect on
  how and when students notice them.

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Cognitively Effective Design
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Cognitively Effective Design

• The effectiveness of a structure or process
  measures the probability that subjects will
  comprehend, perceive, extract the meaning, or use
  the structure correctly.
• a) use the interface, hence not reject it
  outright as being too complex to be useful
• b) use the display to obtain the result the users
  want because the display makes it easier to
  understand the options and their relations better

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Personal Learning Management (Foroughi , 2005)

• The organizer
• Information on self progress
• Search tool for suitable content and assessment
  modules
• Emulating presence through a talking avatar

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Blooming E-Learning

• Adapting Blooms Taxonomy into the content of
  e-learning course to promote life long learning
  through Metacognition.
• University of Dublin
• Trinity College

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Blooming E-Learning

• E-learning course developed as a web site
• Introduction to HTML
• Skills and knowledge to produce a web site
• Recognise current metacognitive skills and
  enhance them
• Blooms taxonomy
• Metacognitive instructional approaches

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Blooming E-Learning

• Blooms taxonomy (Bloom, 1956)
• Can be used as a means by which teachers and
  students can be introduced to metacognition.

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Blooming E-Learning

• E-Learning course
• 6 chapter
• Each chapter incorporates one of Blooms
  educational objectives
• Each chapter incorporates one of the
  metacognitive instructional approaches by
  Macpherson (2002)
• Metacognitive explanation
• Scaffolded instruction
• Cognitive choaching
• Head to Hands
• Co-operative learning

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Blooming E-Learning

• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Content displayed as web pages
• Bloom knowledge
• Exercise recall
• Chapter 2 - Text
• Learners can enter text, format it into headings,
  paragraphs, lists, etc.
• Bloom comprehension
• Exercise Hot Potatoes

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Blooming E-Learning

• Chapter 3 - Links
• Add links to page
• Bloom application
• Exercise create web page
• Metacognitive explanation
• Chapter 4 Images
• Insert images
• Bloom analysis
• Exercise view an existing web page and pick out
  the elements and tags that make it up
• Co-operative learning

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Blooming E-Learning

• Chapter 5 Tables
• Bloom synthesis
• Exercise Link two web pages
• Heads-to-Hand
• Chapter 6 Forms and Design
• Bloom evaluation
• Exercise create a form and add some elements
• Scaffold instruction

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Blooming E-Learning

• Evaluation
• Metacognitive knowledge monitoring assessment
  (Tobias Everson, 1996)
• Predication for success with actual successful
  performance
• Predication for failure with actual unsuccessful
  performance
• Predication for failure with actual successful
  performance
• Predication for success with actual unsuccessful
  performance

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Blooming E-Learning

• Lack of measures for general megacognition
• ? Reduced the overall assessment to the
  metacognitive strategies

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Blooming E-Learning

• Course incorporated metacognitive skills
• Content received good feedback
• Benefit, helped learn HTML

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Resources

• http//interactivity.ucsd.edu/articles/Metacogniti
  on/Elearning10.pdf
• https//www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/mscitedu/mite_wrk/re
  sources/portfolios/2001/doyle_e/Final.rtf
• http//fie.engrng.pitt.edu/fie2005/papers/1321.pdf
  
• http//www.learningcircuits.org/2003/oct2003/dobro
  volny.htm
• Schwartz, N.H., Andersen, C., Hong, N., Howard,
  B., McGee, S. (2004). The influence of
  metacognitive skills on learners memory of
  information in a hypermedia environment. Journal
  of Educational Computing Research, 31, 7793.

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• Thank You For Your Attention