The Concept and Instruction of Metacognition

Teacher Development, Volume 7, Number 1, 2003

The Concept and Instruction of Metacognition

ELEONORA PAPALEONTIOU-LOUCA Frederick Institute of Technology, Cyprus

ABSTRACT Metacognition essentially means cognition about cognition. It refers to both people’s awareness and control, not only of their cognitive processes, but of their emotions and motivations as well. A number of strategies are described that teachers can use to facilitate children’s metacognitive development and promote the monitoring and regulation of their own cognitive enterprises. The educational benefits of the application of metacognitive strategies such as self-awareness and self-monitoring include the development of independent learners who control their own learning and learn how to learn for life.

Introduction Psychology in general and developmental psychology in particular are presently awash in a ‘meta’ flood (metacognition, metamemory, metaperception, metalanguage, and so on). It seems that these constructs reflect a relatively new, stimulating and very attractive research perspective as suggested by a number of review articles (Cavanaugh & Perlmutter, 1982; Wellman, 1983; Schneider, 1985; Brown, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Flavell, 1999; Hacker, n.d.) During the last 30 years metacognition has become one of the major fields of cognitive developmental research. Research activity in metacognition began with John Flavell, who is considered to be the ‘father of the field’ and thereafter a considerable amount of empirical and theoretical research dealing with metacognition can be registered. Moreover, a number of strategies aiming to enhance children’s metacognitive abilities have been suggested, which teachers through all educational levels can apply in their instruction. Such strategies are set out in the relevant section of this article dealing with the development of metacognition in practice and contribute to both the promotion of critical thinking in education and staff development.

9 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca The Concept of Metacognition ‘Metacognition’ is a concept that has been used to refer to a variety of epistemological processes. Metacognition essentially means cognition about cognition; that is, it refers to second-order cognitions: thoughts about thoughts, knowledge about knowledge or reflections about actions. So if cognition involves perceiving, understanding, remembering, and so forth, then metacognition involves thinking about one’s own perceiving, understanding, remembering, etc. These various cognitions about cognitions can be labeled ‘metaperception’, ‘metacomprehension’ and ‘metamemory’ with ‘metacognition’ remaining the superordinate term. Flavell (1978) referred to it as ‘knowledge that takes as its object or regulates any aspect of any cognitive endeavor’ (p. 8). Moore (1982) defines it as ‘an individual’s knowledge about various aspects of thinking’ and it has also been described as ‘the abilities of individuals to adjust their cognitive activity in order to promote more effective comprehension’ (Gavelek & Raphael, 1985, pp. 22-23). Gradually, the concept has been broadened to include anything psychological, rather than just anything cognitive. For instance, if one has knowledge or cognition about one’s own or someone else’s emotions or motives, this can be considered metacognitive. In fact, the recent literature completes the term by adding to its cognitive domain the emotional one – referring to the emotions that accompany the cognitive processes and the person’s ability to monitor them as well as the domain of cognitive habits (Matsaggouras, 1994). Similarly, Flavell (1979), when trying to define the concept of metacognition, refers to all those conscious cognitive or affective experiences that accompany and pertain to an intellectual enterprise. Moreover, a definition of ‘metacognition’ according to Paris & Winograd (1990) ‘captures two essential features …: self-appraisal and self-management of cognition’ (p. 17). Self-appraisals are people’s personal reflections about their own knowledge states and abilities, and their affective states concerning their knowledge, abilities, motivation, and characteristics as learners. Such reflections answer questions about ‘what you know, how you think, and when and why to apply knowledge strategies’ (Paris & Winograd, 1990, p. 17). Self- management refers to ‘metacognition in action’, that is, mental processes that help to ‘orchestrate aspects of problem solving’ including ‘the plans that learners make before tackling a task’, ‘the adjustments they make as they work’, and ‘the revisions they make afterwards’ (p. 18). It is important to note, here, that ‘theoreticians seem unanimous – the most effective learners are self- regulating’ (Butler & Winne, 1995, p. 245). Key to effective self-regulation is accurate self-assessment of what is known or not known (Schoenfeld, 1987). Only when students know the state of their own knowledge can they effectively self-direct learning to the unknown. Recently, the definition of metacognition has been broadened and includes not only ‘thoughts about thoughts’ as it was previously considered, but the following notions as well: knowledge of one’s knowledge, processes,

10 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION and cognitive and affective states; and the ability to consciously and deliberately monitor and regulate one’s knowledge, processes, and cognitive and affective states. Although metacognition may turn out to be a fuzzy concept with indistinct boundaries, key distinctions can be made and a scheme offered that will be useful for organizing and assessing the experimental literature. First, we can distinguish between knowledge and skills – between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’, the old distinction between theory and practice, between competence and performance. One person may ‘know that’ they should distinguish relevant from irrelevant information in a problem, and another person has the ability to do this in practice, perceiving what is relevant in a ‘noisy’ environment. Similarly, one person may know that different strategies can be applied in different problems, and another person has the ability to select the suitable strategy, when needed, to resolve a problem. Ann Brown (1987) distinguishes between knowledge about cognition, and regulation of cognition. Knowledge about cognition can be ‘stable, stable but fallible, or late developing’ information that human thinkers have about their own cognitive processes, which usually remains relatively consistent within individuals. Regulation, on the other hand, can be ‘relatively unstable, rarely stable, and age independent’. Regulation of cognition refers to the activities used to regulate and oversee learning. One may show self-regulatory behavior in one situation but not another, and a child may show self- regulatory behavior where an adult does not. Regulation may be also affected by patterns of arousal (anxiety, fear, interest) and self-concept (self-esteem, self-efficacy). These processes include planning activities (predicting outcomes, scheduling strategies and various forms of vicarious trial and error, etc.) prior to undertaking a problem; monitoring activities (monitoring, testing, revising, and re-scheduling one’s strategies for learning) during learning; and checking outcomes (evaluating the outcome of any strategic actions against criteria of efficiency and effectiveness) at the end (Brown et al, 1983, in Flavell & Markman, 1983). Kluwe (1982) brought further definition to the concept of metacognition, describing activities referred to as metacognitive: ‘(a) the thinking subject has some knowledge about his own thinking and that of other persons; and (b) the thinking subject may monitor and regulate the course of his own thinking, i.e. may act as the causal agent of his own thinking’ (p. 202). Moreover, Kluwe uses the term ‘executive processes’ to denote both monitoring and regulating strategies. Executive monitoring processes involve one’s decisions that help: (a) to identify the task on which one is currently working; (b) to check on current progress of that work; (c) to evaluate that progress; and (d) to predict what the outcome of that progress will be. Executive regulation processes are those that are ‘directed at the regulation of the course of one’s own thinking’ (p. 212). They involve one’s decisions that help (a) to allocate his or her resources to the current task; (b) to determine the order of steps to be taken to complete

11 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca the task; and (c) to set the intensity or (d) the speed at which one should work at the task (Hacker, n.d.) Flavell (1981) makes a second important distinction between metacognitive experiences and metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive experiences are conscious feelings during some cognitive activity that relate to the process – for example, during a communication task, feeling that you do or do not understand; or feeling hesitant about the choice you have made. Metacognitive knowledge, on the other hand, is described by Flavell (1981) as ‘that part of your accumulated world knowledge that has to do with people as cognitive agents and their cognitive tasks, goals, actions and experiences’. Some examples of this kind of metacognition are: when you are able to describe your understanding of what goes on, to explain and recognize feelings of uncertainty or confusion in some people, etc. (These distinctions will be elaborated in detail, later in this article.) Briefly, ‘metacognition’ refers to all processes about cognition, such as sensing something about one’s own thinking, thinking about one’s thinking and responding to one’s own thinking by monitoring and regulating it. As for whether the term ‘metacognitive’ should be used to describe thoughts that were once metacognitive but have since become non-conscious and automatic remains a debatable issue. Nevertheless, many researchers adopt a convention that reserves the term ‘metacognitive’ for conscious and deliberate thoughts that have as their object other thoughts (e.g. Bracewell, 1983; Paris & Winograd, 1990; Borkowski & Muthukrishna, 1992; Carr et al, 1994; Davidson et al, 1994).

Vygotsky as Precursor to Metacognitive Theory According to Brown (1987), Vygotsky’s (1978) influence on metacognitive theory has primarily been effected through his discussion of transference from other-regulation to self-regulation. Basic to Vygotsky’s approach is the assumption that social interaction plays a major role in the origin and development of higher mental (e.g. metacognitive) functions. These functions appear first on the interpsychological (i.e. social) plane and only later on the intrapsychological (i.e. individual) plane. This means that a great deal of learning occurs in the presence of, and is fostered by, the activity of others. So many cognitive acts are initially experienced in social settings, but in time, the results of such experiences become internalized. Initially, supportive others, such as parents, teachers, peers, and so on, act as interrogators, leading the child to more powerful rules and generalizations and guiding the novice to mastery; and there seems to be a systematic regularity in how this guidance works. The interrogative, regulatory role, however, becomes internalized during the process of development and children become able to fulfill some of these functions for themselves through self-regulation and self-interrogation. To put it plainly, this process of internalization goes like this: ... first the adult (parent, teacher, etc.) controls and guides the child’s activity, but gradually the adult and the child come to share the problem

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solving functions, with the child taking initiative and the adult correcting and guiding when s/he falters. Finally, the adult cedes control to the child and functions primarily as a supportive and sympathetic audience. (Brown & French, 1979, cited in Brown et al, 1983, p. 122) In time, children become mature thinkers who provide conflict trials for themselves, question their own basic assumptions, provide counterexamples to their own rules, etc. In short, although a great deal of thinking and leading may remain a social activity, through the process of internalization children become capable of providing the supportive other role for themselves. In this way, progressively, children learn not only how to get a particular task done independently, but also how to set about learning new problems. In other words, children learn how to learn. ‘Learning to learn’, of course, is not content- free, neither does it refer to all learning, but it is specific to certain contexts. It is important, however, to note here that metacognition is not equated with learning or development, but the conscious and deliberate regulation of that learning and development. Moreover, Vygotsky’s theory of language plays an important role in thinking, mediating and directing the individual’s cognitive endeavors. Together with this mediating role of language, Vygotsky’s emphasis on social interactions stresses the sociocultural basis of self- regulation and leads to the fourth metacognitive issue discussed by Brown (1987): ‘the transference from other-regulation to self-regulation’ (pp. 88-103). As to the question of how the individual eventually reaches both reflective awareness (knowledge about cognition) and deliberate control of his own cognition (regulation of cognition), Vygotsky’s theory (1986) focuses our attention on verbalized self-observation (introspection). This implies that the child perceives his own cognitive processes as meaningful. This view of a close connection between knowledge about cognition and control of cognition is made clearer in his study Mind in Society (1978). What is apparent, however, is that many topics discussed in contemporary metacognitive research are integral parts of Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986) theory of cognitive development; undoubtedly he pioneered an approach to metacognition that cannot be easily disputed.

A Model of Cognitive Monitoring According to Flavell (1979), the monitoring of a wide variety of cognitive enterprises occurs through the actions and interactions among four classes of phenomena: a) metacognitive knowledge; b) metacognitive experiences; c) goals (or tasks); d) actions (or strategies).

13 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca The first two have already been mentioned earlier, but will be analyzed in detail below. As for the last two, Flavell states that goals (or tasks) refer to the objectives of a cognitive enterprise, while actions (or strategies) refer to the cognitions or other behaviors employed to achieve them. Flavell’s (1981, p. 40) model of cognitive monitoring is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. A model of cognitive monitoring. (Source: Flavell, 1981, p. 40.)

Let us now turn our attention to the analysis of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experience, as proposed by their introducer, Flavell.

Metacognitive Knowledge This refers to the segment of acquired world knowledge that has to do with cognitive matters. It is the knowledge or beliefs accumulated through experience and stored in long-term memory that concern the human mind and its doings. Some of this stored knowledge is declarative (‘knowing that’) and some of it is procedural (‘knowing how’), for example, your declarative knowledge of how and when to supplement poor memory by the use of shopping lists and other external memory aids (cf. Chi, 1984, in Flavell, 1985). One’s knowledge of any given metacognitive item, could, of course, be both declarative and procedural. For example, one might both know as a verbalizable fact that writing a shopping list is a good memory strategy and also ‘know how’ to write them on appropriate occasions. As already made clear, metacognitive knowledge consists primarily of knowledge or beliefs about what factors or variables act and interact to affect the course and outcome of cognitive enterprises. These factors or variables fall into three major categories: person, task and strategy. The person category encompasses everything that you might believe about the nature of yourself and other people as cognitive processors. It can be further categorized into beliefs about intraindividual differences, interindividual differences, and universals of cognition. An example of the first subcategory would be one’s belief that one person remembers more easily

14 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION than another; of the second, a belief that one can learn most things better by listening than by reading; of the third subcategory, the ascertainment that we usually forget many of the things we have learned as time passes. The second category is knowledge of task variables. The individual learns something about how the nature of the information encountered affects and constrains how one should deal with it. An example would be the knowledge that it is easier to learn the essence or gist of something, such as a story, than it is to learn it verbatim. Strategy variables are about what strategies are likely to be effective in achieving which goals in which sorts of cognitive undertakings. A child may come to believe, for example, that one good way to learn and retain information is to pay particular attention to the main points and try to repeat them to him/herself in his/her own words. Finally, most metacognitive knowledge actually concerns interactions or combinations among two or three of these three types of variables. To illustrate a combination involving all three, one might believe that a pupil (unlike his/her brother – person variable) should use strategy A (rather than strategy B – strategy variable) in task X (as contrasted with task Y – task variable) (Flavell, 1979, 1987). Metacognitive knowledge can have a number of concrete and important effects on the cognitive enterprises of children and adults. It can lead somebody to select, evaluate, revise and abandon cognitive tasks, goals, and strategies. Furthermore, it can lead to any of a wide variety of metacognitive experiences and help us interpret the meaning and behavioral implications of these metacognitive experiences.

Metacognitive Experiences The other major conceptual entity in the taxonomy is metacognitive experiences. Metacognitive experiences can be fully or less fully conscious and verbalizable, brief or lengthy, simple or complex in context. What makes them metacognitive experiences rather than experiences of another kind is that they have to do with some cognitive (and often affective) endeavor or enterprise, most frequently a current, ongoing one. For example, if one suddenly has the anxious feeling that one does not understand something and wants and needs to understand it, that feeling would be a metacognitive experience. One is having a metacognitive experience whenever one has the feeling that something is hard to perceive, comprehend, remember or solve; if there is a feeling that one is far from the cognitive goal. Metacognitive experiences are especially likely to occur in situations that stimulate a lot of careful, highly conscious thinking, and provide many opportunities for thoughts and feelings about your own thinking to arise. They may also occur at any time before, during or after a cognitive endeavor; may be more apt to occur when the cognitive situation is something between completely novel and completely familiar; and when attentional and mnemonic resources are not wholly

15 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca preempted by more urgent subjective experiences, such as pain, anxiety, or depression. Thus, a metacognitive experience can be any kind of affective or cognitive conscious experience that is pertinent to conduct in an ongoing cognitive situation or enterprise (Flavell, 1979, 1987). Metacognitive experiences can have very important effects on cognitive goals or tasks, metacognitive knowledge and cognitive actions or strategies. First, they can lead somebody to establish new goals or revise old ones. Experiences of puzzlement or failure, for example, can have any of these effects. Second, metacognitive experiences can affect one’s metacognitive knowledge store by adding to it, deleting from it, or revising it, as in Piaget’s (Nelson, 1992) model of assimilation and accommodation. Finally, metacognitive experiences can activate strategies aimed at either cognitive or metacognitive goals. As an example of the former, one senses (metacognitive experience) that one does not yet know a certain chapter in a text well enough to pass tomorrow’s exam, so one reads it through once more (the cognitive goal here is to improve one’s knowledge). As an example of the latter, one wonders (metacognitive experience) whether one understands the chapter well enough to pass tomorrow’s exam, so one tries to find out by asking oneself questions about it and noting how well one is able to answer them (the metacognitive goal here is to assess one’s own knowledge). Adding to the concept of metacognition, Efklides (2002) introduces another aspect of it, one that serves the control of cognition, namely, metacognitive skills. Since the components of metacognition serve the monitoring rather than the control of cognition (Brown, 1978), one could refer to this new aspect of metacognition as one which serves the control of cognition. Metacognitive skills refer to conscious control processes such as planning, monitoring of the progress of processing, effort allocation, strategy use and regulation of cognition. Before ending up with this model it must be noted that metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experiences and metacognitive skills form partially overlapping sets. Some experiences have the same knowledge as their content and some do not. Some knowledge may become conscious and comprise such experiences and some may never do so. Moreover, metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experiences and metacognitive skills complement and enrich each other. For example, not only does some kind of metacognitive knowledge seem to be needed for one to interpret properly and act upon metacognitive experience, but conversely, metacognitive experience also contributes information about persons, tasks, and strategies to one’s developing store of metacognitive knowledge. The ideas and feelings one experiences while watching or playing, say, tennis, might contribute to the knowledge of tennis. To put it simply, it seems likely that metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, and metacognitive skills are constantly informing and eliciting one another during the course of a cognitive task.

16 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION The Development of Metacognition in Practice If we wish to develop intelligent behavior as a significant outcome of education, instructional strategies intended to develop children’s metacognitive abilities must be infused into our teaching methods, staff development, and supervisory processes (Costa, 1981, cited in Costa, 1987). Metacognition, like everything else, undoubtedly develops with practice. Interestingly though, direct instruction in metacognition may not be beneficial. When strategies of problem solving are imposed rather than generated by the students themselves, their performance may be impaired. Conversely, when students experience the need for problem solving strategies, induce their own, discuss them and practice them to a degree that they become spontaneous and unconscious, their metacognition seems to improve (Sternberg & Wagner, 1982, cited in Costa, 1987). The trick, therefore, is to teach metacognitive skills without creating an even greater burden on students’ ability to attend. Although the strong focus of metacognitive research was initially on the theoretical aspects of metacognition, recently an equally strong focus was created regarding its educational application. Therefore, many researchers, convinced of the educational relevance that metacognitive theory has for teachers and students, are shifting their attention from the theoretical to the practical, from the laboratory to the classroom. For example, Borkowski & Muthukishna (1992) argue that metacognitive theory has ‘considerable potential for aiding teachers as they strive to construct classroom environments that focus on strategic learning that is both flexible and creative’ (p. 479); and Paris & Winograd (1990) argue that ‘students can enhance their learning by becoming aware of their own thinking as they read, write and solve problems in school. Teachers can promote this awareness directly by informing students about effective problem solving strategies and discussing cognitive and motivational characteristics of thinking’ (p. 15). Teachers can use a variety of strategies to enhance metacognition, independent of grade level and subject area, though the level of metacognitive abilities varies with age and maturation. Koutselini (1991, pp. 52-53) suggests a series of such strategies, which help students to become conscious of the way in which they think. Metacognitive abilities: – encourage the student to ‘think aloud’; – focus his/her attention on understanding the way she/he thinks and the problems she/he has to solve; – ask not only for the results, but also for the procedure of thought and the strategy followed; – teach strategies for overcoming difficulties; – place each subject among its relevant ones and find connections among them;

17 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca – encourage the student to generate questions before, during and after the elaboration of a subject; – help the student to perceive entities, connections, relations, similarities and differences; – enable the student to become aware of the criteria for assessment. In their effort to promote metacognitive development in students, teachers should also offer them opportunities for the fostering of metacognitive experiences, which, in turn, will provide input to permanent metacognitive knowledge. Two important metacognitive experiences that have to be promoted are consciousness and introspection. Teachers can engage children in cognitive enterprises that should produce specifiable metacognitive ideas and feelings. They can try to get them to attend to these ideas and feelings; to help them understand their meanings and implications for subsequent cognitive action; and to teach them how to generate metacognitive experiences, as well as to respond appropriately to them. In communicative situations, students can acquire self-control and monitoring when they keep exchanging roles as speakers and listeners or when they have to analyze messages as cognitive objects in order to understand each other, and so on. Research has also proposed a range of various strategies aiming to develop children’s metacognition and lead them to learn how to learn (Costa, 1987; Flavell, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Identifying ‘What You Know’ and ‘What You Don’t Know’ At the beginning of a research activity children need to make conscious decisions about their knowledge. Initially children write ‘What I already know about …’. As children research the topic, they will verify, clarify and expand, or replace with more accurate information, each of their initial statements (Blakey & Spence, 1990).

Planning and Organizing Strategy Children must assume increasing responsibility for planning and regulating their learning. It is difficult for learners to become self-directed when learning is planned and monitored by someone else. Enhancing planning in children would probably facilitate their metacognitive development and promote the monitoring and regulation of one’s own cognitive enterprises. So, it is likely that an individual who can create conscious explicit representations and interrelate past, present and future actions should be in a better position to acquire metacognitive knowledge. In schools, effective teachers are those who engage in continual prompts to get children to plan and monitor their own activities.

18 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION Children can be taught to make plans for learning activities including time requirements, organizing materials, and scheduling procedures necessary to complete an activity. Prior to any learning activity, teachers should point out strategies and steps for tackling problems, rules to remember, and directions to follow. Time constraints, purposes, and ground rules under which students must operate should be identified and internalized. Making these guidelines explicit helps students keep focused during the lesson and enables them to evaluate their performance later (Costa, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Generating Questions Almost by definition, learner-generated questions involve a high degree of metacognitive involvement because the learner is acting independently in monitoring and regulating his or her own comprehension. They actually serve two important metacognitive functions: the monitoring of learners’ current understanding and seeking of information in situations where the necessary information is not available or part of their knowledge store. The ability to determine the presence, absence, and completeness of information required for one’s own individual comprehension is metacognitive in nature. By asking their own questions, students frequently pause and think about whether, for instance, they know main characters or events, if they are grasping the concept, if they can relate it to what they already know, if they can give other examples, and whether they can use the main idea to explain other ideas or predict what may come next (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997). All these help students become more self-aware and take conscious control of their own studying; and as is often said: ‘Teach somebody how to ask questions and she or he will learn how to learn for the rest of his/her life’ (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Choosing Consciously Teachers can promote metacognition by helping students explore the consequences of their choices and decisions, prior to the decision, during the act of deciding and after the decision. Students will then be able to perceive causal relationships among their choices, their actions, and the results they achieve. Providing non-judgmental feedback to students about the effects of their behaviors and decisions on others and on their environment helps them become aware of their own behaviors (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Setting and Pursuing Goals Parents and teachers, in their effort to provide children with the metacognitive assistance needed, can help them define their personal goals and justify their

19 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca reasons for their decisions, remind the child where she or he is with respect to the goal, call his or her attention to relevant perceptual or conceptual facts and arrange the environment in such a way that she or he can deal with each step in the problem separately (Trilianos, 1997).

Evaluating the Way of Thinking and Acting Teachers can enhance metacognition by helping students reflect upon and evaluate their own thoughts and actions according to multiple criteria. Criteria for evaluation can be firstly developed together with students, so they will gradually learn to think and ask questions of themselves as they proceed through a learning activity. An example would be to invite students to identify their errors and to self-correct; to distinguish what was helpful in their effort to reach their goal and what was hindering; what they liked and didn’t like; or what were the pluses and minuses of the activity; also, to determine how successful their work was; how time-consuming it was; how effective or aesthetic the results were, etc. Guided self-evaluation experiences can be introduced through individual conferences and checklists focusing on thinking processes. Gradually, self- evaluation will be applied more independently. As children recognize that learning activities in different disciplines are similar, they will begin to transfer learning strategies to new situations. Thus, students keep the criteria in mind, apply them to multiple classification systems, and justify their reasons accordingly (Costa, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Identifying the Difficulty Teachers can inform students that their excuses – ‘I can’t’; ‘I don’t know how to ...’; or ‘I’m too slow to ...’ – are not the best way to get what they want. Instead, students should be asked to identify what information is required, what materials are needed, or what skills are lacking in their ability to perform the desired behavior. This helps students identify the boundaries between what they know and what they need to know. This, in turn, will develop a preserving attitude and enhance the students’ ability to create strategies that will produce the necessary data (Presseisen, 1984).

Paraphrasing and Elaborating Students’ Ideas Teachers can also help their students to organize their thoughts by paraphrasing what they are saying, extending their ideas, putting their thoughts in some order, imposing, clarifying questions and so on. The teacher can say, for example: ‘What you’re telling me is ...’; ‘What I hear in your plan are the following steps ...’, etc. In this way, students learn gradually how to organize their thoughts themselves, how to make explicit what they want to

20 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION say in order to communicate effectively and at the same time they enhance their level of thinking (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Labeling Students’ Behaviors When teachers place labels on students’ cognitive processes, students become conscious of their own actions. For example: ‘What I see you doing is making out a plan of action for ...’; ‘What you are doing is called an experiment’; ‘You’re being very helpful to your friend by sharing your paints. That’s an example of cooperation’ (Costa, 1987; Trilianos, 1997).

Debriefing the Thinking Process Closure activities focus student discussion on the thinking processes to develop awareness of strategies that can be applied to other learning situations. A three-step method is useful. First, the teacher guides students to review the activity, gathering data on thinking processes and feelings. Then, the group classifies related ideas, identifying thinking strategies used. Finally, they evaluate their success, discarding inappropriate strategies, identifying those valuable for future use, and seeking promising alternative approaches (Blakey & Spence, 1990).

Problem Solving and Research Activities Problem solving and research activities in all subjects provide opportunities for developing metacognitive strategies. Teachers need to focus student attention on how tasks are accomplished. Process goals, in addition to content goals, must be established and evaluated with students so that they discover that understanding and transferring thinking processes improves learning. Regardless of how much experience or knowledge a problem solver has, each new problem situation is in some ways unique, requiring creative application of strategies for posing, solving and resolving the problem at hand. Reading, writing, and discussion are problem solving activities, and language is an ideal subject in which to practice problem solving strategies, that is, metacognitive skills. Expert problem solvers and effective thinkers of all kinds are usually self- aware thinkers. They plan strategies for tackling thinking problems. When they hit blind alleys, they stop, analyze and reflect. Effective thinkers pose alternatives for themselves and choose among them. Their abilities to reflect on their thinking ‘as thinking’ and to analyze their own strategies are their metacognitive skills (Blakey & Spence, 1990).

21 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca Role Playing Role playing can promote metacognition because when students assume the roles of other persons, they consciously maintain the attributes and characteristics of that person. Dramatization serves as a hypothesis or prediction of how that person would think, feel or react in a particular situation. Taking on another role contributes to the reduction of egocentric perceptions (Costa, 1987; Trilianos, 1997).

‘Thinking Aloud’ One of the most effective ways of helping students to organize and enhance their thoughts is to invite them to ‘think aloud’ while they are working, especially during problem solving processes. Talking about thinking is important because students need a thinking vocabulary. Besides, inviting students to describe their thinking (goals, plans, strategies, means to be used, etc.), and explain their choices, seems to produce more thinking. This strategy, as suggested by Vygotsky’s ‘egocentric speech’, not only facilitates thought and accelerates the problem solving process, but also enables the individual to induce more deliberate planning, helping the learning process, as well as the transfer of the rules applied to similar situations (Brown, 1987; Garner, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990).

Interactive Multimedia Learning Environments Within an interactive multimedia program the metacognitive support template is unique in that it aids students in their thinking, information processing and monitoring of their own learning processes. Instructional technology provides students with metacognitive support based upon a constructivist epistemology. How we construct knowledge depends upon what we already know, our previous experiences, how we have organized those experiences into knowledge structures and the way we interpret the world. Norman (1993, in Gordon, 1996) argues that ‘computers support reflective thinking when they enable users to compose new knowledge by adding new representations, modifying old ones and comparing the two’ (Gordon, 1996, p. 4).

Keeping a Thinking Journal Another means of developing metacognition is through the use of a journal or learning log. This is a diary in which students reflect upon their thinking, make a note of their awareness of ambiguities and inconsistencies, and comment on how they have dealt with difficulties. This journal is a diary of process (Costa, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Trilianos, 1997).

22 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION Children Teaching Children/Cooperative Learning Teachers must be prepared to let students teach each other, for this strategy seems to be in many ways beneficial to the learners; apart from the collaboration that is fostered, students usually become not only more aware of others’ thinking, but more aware of their own thinking as well. More importantly, students who act as ‘tutors’ have to plan in speech what they are going to teach and this very thing leads them to advanced and independent learning. For example, in a paired problem solving exercise, one student talks through a problem, describing his or her thinking processes. A partner listens and asks questions to help clarify thinking. Similarly, in reciprocal teaching (Palinscar, Ogle, Jones, Carr & Ransom, all in Blakey & Spence, 1990), small groups of students take turns playing teacher, asking questions, and clarifying and summarizing the material being studied (Blakey & Spence, 1990; Charalambous, 1999).

Modeling Of all the instructional techniques suggested, the one which probably influences most students is that of teacher modeling. During planning and problem solving situations, teachers should think aloud so that the students can follow demonstrating thinking processes. Since students learn best by imitating the adults around them, the teacher who publicly demonstrates metacognition will probably produce students who metacogitate. One way to make strategy thinking public is for the teacher to render the covert cognitive and metacognitive processes in overt form by thinking aloud while modeling task completion. Some other indicators of teachers’ public metacognitive behavior might be: sharing their planning, describing their goals and objectives and giving reasons for their actions; seeking feedback and evaluation of their actions from others; admitting they do not know an answer but designing ways to produce one, and so on. Besides, modeling offers the vocabulary students need for thinking and talking about their own thinking. Metacognitive strategies are already in teachers’ repertoires. We must become alert to these strategies, and consciously model them for students (Costa, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Trilianos, 1997). In the long run, all these strategies tend to develop self-awareness, self- control and self-regulation; that is, they aim to make students independent learners and enable them to learn how to learn: Surprisingly, metacognitive awareness is not uniformly developed in students. In reading, even college age students are unaware of how they can approach texts, plan their studying, or work through problems that have stumped them. In writing, inexpert writers follow one procedure again and again without flexibility, even in the face of persistent failure. However, teachers can promote awareness of strategies for thinking by

23 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca engaging their students in activities that require reflection. Students can keep and share a ‘process log’ where they write about the processes they employ in writing, reading, or problem solving generally. As students share their entries, they gain an awareness of alternatives to their own processes, and the teacher can direct them to consider specific strategies. Teachers, as expert readers and writers, can also make their thinking strategies explicit by ‘thinking-aloud’ with students as they read and write together. Group work or discussion time can also regularly include a ‘process observer’, namely a participant who agrees to pay attention to how the interaction progresses and to report to the group an analysis of its process. Activities like these, that require students to make the sometimes invisible work of thinking visible and explicit, help all students to understand that as thinkers, they are in charge. (School Improvement in Maryland, n.d.) However, in order to reach the stage of self-regulation, according to Vygotsky, the individual should be able to control his or her own cognition with the help of inner speech, through the process of internalization. To reach this stage, one has to experience first the stage of egocentric speech, which ‘serves mental orientation, conscious understanding; it helps overcoming difficulties; it is speech for oneself, intimately and usefully connected with the child’s thinking’ (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 228). This is the reason why teachers at school should – and often do – encourage students to think aloud; for talking to oneself not only facilitates and organizes thinking, but also helps students internalize the principles they verbalize and make them an integral part of their own cognition. There is satisfactory evidence that language facilitates and enhances metacognition, though the contrary is probably also true. This is apparent not only in the thinking aloud strategy, but in other metacognitive strategies as well where language is inevitably involved; such as generating questions by the learners, justifying the choices and decisions one makes, describing the steps one follows in a problem solving situation, identifying and correcting the errors made, evaluating the process of thinking, the strategies followed and the results, role playing activities and so on. This is also true in topics such as ‘oral communication, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, writing, language acquisition, problem solving, social cognition and various types of self-control and self-instruction’ (Flavell, 1979, p. 906). In all these activities language is being both fostered and developed, and at the same time, it is fostering such abilities as self-awareness and self-control, that is, it develops metacognition. This is also true in all those activities encouraged by schools where students are asked to express their thoughts either orally or in writing. Expressive talking and expressive writing require their producers to tap into their memory, establish what they know, review the information they have generated and translate it into inner or verbalized speech (or print), organize main ideas into logical sequences, discover specific support for those main

24 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION ideas, construct a structural framework for communicating an intended message and evaluate the product. All these activities involve considerable practice and skill in cognitive monitoring and promote metacognitive activity. Moreover, writing, though not a metacognitive experience itself, affords practice and experience in metacognition, since the planning of sentences requires metacognitive activity if you are writing about your thinking. It also encourages the individual to imagine the thoughts of others, in his or her effort to see whether they understand or believe what one is trying to convey in one’s writing. The same applies in dialogue and communication in general where both listeners and speakers have to become skillful and critical, taking into account not only the partner’s knowledge of the particular subject, but also his/her intentions, comprehension, deficiencies and so on, and use language on the basis of these inferences. These experiences can be characterized as metacognitive. The main assumption here seems to be that school offers a large field for fostering metacognitive abilities; and in this effort, language seems to play a major role, not only by providing the means or the vehicle for doing this, but most importantly by being involved actively in this process and contributing significantly in making students control their own learning. In sum, we can say that metacognition is a useful tool in teachers’ hands, for it facilitates their work and helps them to organize more systematically the results of an effective learning. A brief reference to the educational implications of the metacognitive strategies in practice will be considered below.

Educational Implications of the Application of Metacognitive Strategies Metacognition is a ‘tool of wide application’ and its development gains additional importance and interest because of this fact. As cognition comes into play whenever we operate intellectually in any domain, the same can also apply to metacognition. Thus, although metacognition can be construed as domain-specific knowledge, it should be remembered that its ‘domain’ spans all others (Flavell, 1985). What is the particular usefulness and adaptiveness of metacognition? According to Flavell (1987): Metacognition is especially useful for a particular kind of organism, one that has the following properties. First, the organism should obviously tend to think a lot; by definition an abundance of metacognition presupposes an abundance of cognition. Second, the organism should be fallible and error-prone, and thus in need of careful monitoring and regulation. Third, the organism should want to communicate, explain and justify its thinking to other organisms as well as to itself; these activities clearly require metacognition. Fourth, in order to survive and prosper, the

25 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca organism should need to plan ahead and critically evaluate alternative plans. Fifth, if it has to make weighty, carefully considered decisions, the organism will require metacognitive skills. Finally, it should have a need or proclivity for inferring and explaining psychological events in itself and others, a penchant for engaging in those metacognitive acts termed social cognition. Needless to say, human beings are organisms with just these properties. (p. 27) Flavell (1979) also states: I find it hard to believe that children who do more cognitive monitoring would not learn better both in and out of school than children who do less. I also think that increasing the quantity and quality of children’s metacognitive knowledge and monitoring skills through systematic training may be feasible as well as desirable. (p. 910) The above seems especially true, if we consider that students at school cannot plan ahead, choose the right strategy every time to solve a particular task, monitor and evaluate the acts and results of their work, and so on, unless they have mastered some kind of metacognitive ability. More importantly, metacognitive development leads students to independent learning, more permanent knowledge, motivation for learning and higher achievement (Koutselini, 1995) as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Components of the concept of metacognition. (Source: Koutselini, 1995, p. 51.)

26 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION As mentioned at the beginning of this article, metacognition’s domain spans all others. This very advantage allows the metacognitive processes to have a wide application in a range of different situations. It is important, for example, that basic strategies can apply in the metacognitive development of students regardless of grade, level or subject area. It is also important that such processes allow the learners to go far beyond the subject of instruction and apply their learning in other, similar situations. Teachers may not maximize their students’ potential if they tend to teach them only facts, rules or principles, without teaching them how they can learn more about these or about another content. Similarly, teaching is of little value if it simply asks children to learn by heart some rules, without enabling them to reach conclusions themselves and without helping them to transfer rules in real situations, through problem solving. Such ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ is, at best, limited, and has no breadth, since it does not help children become independent learners, but links such learning to the particular situation in which it occurred and nothing more. On the other hand, expert thinkers are distinguished by the degree to which they strategically plan, manage their time and resources, and monitor their progress during intellectually demanding tasks. They demonstrate metacognitive abilities, i.e. they think about, and direct their own thinking. In this way, metacognitive strategies, by aiming to foster abilities such as self- awareness, self-control and self-monitoring, produce independent learners who control their own learning and learn how to learn for life. Before ending this article, it is worth mentioning that metacognition has, nowadays, expanded its application to a number of educational and other enterprises. Many investigators (Flavell & Wellman, 1977; Markman, 1977; Brown, 1978; Flavell 1978) have concluded that ‘metacognition plays an important role and facilitates oral communication of information, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, reading comprehension, writing, language acquisition, attention, memory, problem solving, social cognition, and various types of self-control and self-instruction; there are also clear indications that ideas about metacognition are beginning to make contact with similar ideas in the areas of social learning theory, cognitive behavior modification, personality development and education’ (Flavell, 1979, p. 906).

Some Final Conclusions The concept of metacognition has become one of the most attractive issues for cognitively oriented instructional psychologists because it addresses two of its major concerns: first, it goes to the very heart of the cognitivists’ assumption of the learner as an active organism. It is individuals’ metacognitive knowledge that enables them to behave in this way, taking an active part in the process of learning; or to influence the input that in turn influences their activity. Second, and related, the concept of metacognition addresses one of the perennial problems of instruction – that of transfer or generalization of what has been

27 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca learned. Besides, this is the great advantage of metacognition: it enables learners to know what and how they know, and to apply this knowledge across different settings, without having to relearn it, in every context. In the 1980s, teaching for thinking (cognition) and its development was presumably the most important educational discovery (Calfee, 1981, cited in Koutselini, 1995). For the new century, metacognition has been an indicator of the ‘educated intellect’ in which we place most of our expectations for effective teaching and learning, and for the development of active, creative and independent lifelong learners. This is what children require and is a pressing need for the new century.

Correspondence Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca, 4 Ag. Frangiskou-Assizis, CY-6050 Larnaca, Cyprus ([email protected]).

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