Introduction to the week

This week we will explore and number of other types of thinking that are related to reflective thinking including metacognition, creative thinking, divergent thinking and critical thinking. We start with metacognitive thinking.

Introduction

Metacognition can be described in general terms as 'thinking about our thinking' and De Verlaine (2022) states that "reflexivity is therefore a form of metacognition", "reflection is an act of looking back in order to process experiences". If an individual has a thought and then considers why they have that thought, then they are engaged in a metacognitive activity (Flavell, 1979; Metcalfe and Shimamura, 1994; Robinson and Gonnerman, 2020). It involves being aware of our thought processes and understanding the patterns behind them. It also includes reflecting on our own thought processes and knowing which strategy is best to apply to a specific problem. As well as knowing about our thought processes metacognition also involves the ability to control our own thinking.

So from the descriptions above we might take the view that reflection, reflexivity and metacognition (or at least metacognitive awareness) are all aspects of the same thing which relate to when we apply it (in action or on action) and the depth to which we are prepared to go with our questioning of our own thinking in terms of our assumptions and its affect on other people. Fortuin and van Koppen (2016) describe metacognition as the ability to identify and evaluate the contribution of various scientific disciplines and non-academic knowledge and how to include values and interests in order to design solutions for the problem in consideration.

Metacognition has also been typified by the ability to transfer or adapt knowledge to new situations and tasks (Schoenfeld, 1991) and being conscious about the things you know about (Zohar and Ben David, 2009). It includes knowing what you know, knowing what you do not know and actively monitoring your thinking processes (Bransford et al., 2000).

It should be noted that metacognitive knowledge is not the same as metacognitive control, we can know how to do a thing but not actually do it. Metacognitive control is about being able to monitor and modify our cognitive activities when we choose to (Schraw, 2001). So it is not sufficient to just learn about metacognition, it also needs to be practised.

Types of knowledge

Four types of knowledge are commonly recognised: declarative (factual), procedural, strategic (conceptual) and metacognitive (Krathwohl, 2002) . Declarative knowledge (or content knowledge) relates to knowing facts. Procedural knowledge (or task knowledge) relates to being able to perform tasks including knowledge about their type, difficulty and duration. Strategic knowledge (or conditional knowledge) relates to our knowledge of our own abilities and when to apply the most appropriate strategy. Metacognitive knowledge includes knowing about the other three types of knowledge as well as understanding our own cognitive processes, how we feel about performing a task and a knowledge of metacognitive strategies for controlling cognition (Efklides, 2008).

Experts

Experts have acquired extensive knowledge in their subject area. This affects the information that they notice, how they organise and represent it, and how they interpret it. They notice features and meaningful patterns and tend to ‘chunk’ information (Egan and Schwartz, 1979). This is important because our short term memories only have the ability to hold 7±2 things (Miller, 1956) or according to Cowan (2001) only 4±1 things. The way that experts organise information increases their ability to store knowledge which they organise around core concepts and big ideas. They tend not to store isolated facts but ‘contexts of applicability’ and can retrieve important aspects of knowledge with little attention or effort (Bransford et al., 2000).

The down side is that experts are not necessarily good at teaching their knowledge and that they may or may not show any adaptive expertise or in how they approach new situations i.e. they may not practise metacognition (Bransford et al., 2000, p.31-45). New understanding and knowledge tends to be built on what we already know, which may be a constraint (Cobb, 1994). A nice example of this is ‘Fish is Fish’ (Bransford et al., 2000, p.22) where a hypothetical fish asks his friend the frog what life is like on dry land and starts to interpret what he is told from his own experiences e.g. people are fish that walk on their tail fins. Hatano and Inagaki (1984) draw a distinction between two types of experts, ‘routine experts’ who are fast and accurate at performing tasks but who lack flexibility in their thinking and ‘adaptive experts’ who tend to easily adapt their thinking when things change.

The absence of metacognition

When an individual lacks metacognitive skills they suffer from a dual burden, they make bad choices and draw false conclusions but worse still they do not realise it. Dunning and Kruger ran a number of experiments testing humour, logical reasoning and English grammar (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). They found that in their tests students who scored in the bottom quartile overestimated how well they had done but not only did they overestimate their scores but they did so dramatically (by on average a stunning 50% more). The rest of the students overestimated their scores by about 6% except for the high achievers who tended to underestimate their scores. Dunning and Kruger proposed that the bottom quartile students not only lack the skills to perform the task but also lack the metacognitive skills to realise that their ability was lacking. They were less able to gain insights from social comparisons and had difficulties recognising competences in others. They also proposed that the high achievers' downgrading of their own abilities might be due to the regression effect or the false consensus effect. Similar results have been replicated by a number of other studies in other areas of knowledge and skills. Dunning and Kruger suggest that one way to improve the poor students' metacognitive skills was to, paradoxically, help them become more competent in the particular skill.

We all appear to overestimate our own abilities in any specific area, and maybe dramatically so, which led Dunning and Kruger in their closing remarks to say:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is also linked to the 'better than average' effect. For example (Cross, 1977) questioned lecturers at a university and found that 94% of them viewed themselves as above average teachers.

Teaching metacognition

Khoo et al. (2019) feel that there is a dearth of metacognitive thinking across the board in higher education and Puryear (2016) views it as important for creativity. Schraw (2001) believes that metacognition can be taught although Zohar and Ben David (2009) highlight that this may take considerable time. Pintrich (2002) points out that learning metacognitive skills needs to be actively taught and practised and that these skills might include training in three domains: self knowledge, strategic thinking and knowledge about cognitive tasks. The use of explicit language and suitable context is needed (Tanner, 2012). Metacognitive training helps people choose the right strategic thinking for the problem; helps them adopt better thinking (Swanson, 1990); and improves general domain skills (Gourgey, 2001). A lot of an individual's thinking may be cognitively passive, approaches to create cognitively active approaches are useful in developing metacognitive awareness (Stanger-Hall, 2012).

Metacognition techniques 1

A number of techniques for improving metacognition have been suggested by various authors. One simple one is to “think aloud” (Groot, 2014) where he got experts to turn their thinking into words as they were thinking about a problem, this not only helped the experts become aware of their thinking processes but also helped novice listeners to understand.

Practice

• During the rest of today when you feel 'stuck' in your thinking try explaining the situation out loud to yourself. When you get used to this you may also be able to start 'talking to yourself' in your our head without needing to actually speak aloud

• Remember to make a note of your experience in whatever way you are making a note of your thinking (e.g. in your journal)