Metacognition: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my brain.

Author's note: I originally wrote this as a summary of the advice that I gave one of my students, I felt like I should document it so that maybe it could help others.

                Essays like this often start out with definitions.  In the spirit of conformity, we will start with a general definition of metacognition.  Metacognition, simply stated, is just awareness of your own thinking.  When I pointed out that essays like this often start with a definition, many of you who are practiced writers will identify that practice as a maneuver (maybe ham-fisted in this case) by a writer to set the reader squarely in front of a his or her thesis.  If you saw that ploy, then you’re following the steps I’m laying out for you in the organization of this paper.  What does this all mean and why am I writing about my own writing?  I’ll answer that in a minute, but first a sports analogy.

                Imagine a moment in a hockey game where Chris the center breaks away and skates madly down the ice.  Only Dale the defenseman stands in his way.  Chris slides the puck and shifts his weight as though he is getting ready to zig left.  Dale see’s the body language and response with immense athleticism and lunges to intercept.  Alas, Dale is duped and Chris zags to the right, not to the left, leaving the defenseman humiliated.  The next time this happens, Dale doesn’t fall for the feint.  He instead analyzes the situation and considers his opponent.  In the split second before action, Dale contemplates whether or not his adversary is attempting to induce Dale to overcommit himself to one course of action.  Dale is now playing like an expert defenseman because instead of responding to the most proximal and immediate signals, he is aware of all the positions on the ice and sees Chris’s moves like a chess player sees the moves of a rook. 

                Alright, enough of the obligatory sports analogy, you’re still waiting for me to get to the point and tell you how all this meta-hockey-stuff will make you a better student.  Well here it is in a nutshell: awareness and analysis aren’t the result of being an expert, they are tools to become an expert.  If you want to be a better student, that is to say, you wants your brain to learn more gooder, utilize awareness and analysis to become an expert at studying!

                So the secret is out, metacognition is a tool to become an expert at studying.  I can just about hear you all asking “So what exactly should I metacognate about?”.  Well, I’m glad you asked that question because it’s what I’m going to talk about anyway.  I’m going to break it down into two big categories and fill in some details and finer points, and then we will wrap up with a summary (for the people who skip to end and only read the last paragraph).

                The first big category of ours is “teacher things”.  This means all the things that go on in the classroom, assignments, exams, and generally anything that is directly controlled or decided upon by the teacher.  Increasing your understanding of “teacher things” is very important, but a bit beyond the aim of this essay.  The other big category of ours is “self things”.  This would be all of the things that we directly and explicitly control such as study techniques, time prioritization, and test anxiety.  “Self things” is where we’re going to turn our spotlight for now.  The last brief tangent before we explore metacognition in studying is to acknowledge that our current study techniques aren’t perfect and we often stumbled upon them by happy accident rather than by concerted and willful choice.  Your studying habits might have sufficed in earlier classes, but to thrive and succeed in the most challenging classes, you’ll need to be an expert at studying which might mean throwing away some old habits. 

                I can pretty much guarantee that anyone reading this shares the experience of having ‘read’ an entire page of a textbook only to get to the bottom and realize that nothing sank in.  Your eyes were moving back and forth and your internal voice started off with every intention of diligently following the text on the page but soon it was wondering about lunch or your date or the new action movie or whatever, all the while your eyes kept sweeping back and forth.  Even when you do read every word on every page in an entire textbook chapter, when you get to the end you never feel like you have a complete and perfect understanding of the material.  If textbooks are meant to teach us, how come we don’t learn just by reading them?  Well, modern textbooks are somewhere between dense reference books and a conversational discussion of the material.  We’re fooled into thinking that we can understand the material as fast as we can read it because we understand each word as we read it.  That's really important so I'm going to say it again: we read at maybe 180-200 words per minute, and you probably know the definition of 99.9% of the words that you read, but the concepts that you're studying are really hard and our brains just can't soak up that information that rapidly. What we really need is a bit of perspective.  It’s easy enough to reflect back on reading a chapter and see that you didn’t learn much from it, but how many of you have ever realized during the time that your eyes were wandering brainlessly around the page “Boy, I’m really not absorbing this material effectively.”?  Probably fewer have ever had the converse thought during a really cogent explanation of a concept “Boy, I’m really learning this material effectively right now”.  We just don’t give much thought to our thoughts.

                I have a two part exercise to increase awareness of your current learning efficacy.  Starting right now, after each time that you put effort into learning something I want you to actually name the technique you used and then rate it on a scale of one to ten as to how much it improved your understanding of the material.  It’s important that you give a clear name to your techniques because it’s too easy for us to be vague about categorization unless we commit our ideas to ink and paper.  So after you’ve spent the 25 minutes reading through and highlighting the upcoming chapter, go to the end of your notebook and actually write “highlighted text on first read through: 4/10”.  The second part of this exercise is to transition from an explicit post hoc task to an implicit acknowledgement during the studying effort itself.  While you are in the midst of the studying, think to yourself “What am I going to write at the end of my notebook after this?” or to put more succinctly “What am I doing and is it working?”

                Once you are in the habit of focusing some of your thoughts and attention on how well you’re learning, it will become inescapably evident which habits you should abandon.  Abandoning a study technique doesn’t mean abandoning studying though.  If you’re not gaining much by taking notes, then do some research into alternate note taking strategies (maybe you’re using the Cornell method whereas a mind-map would be better suited).  Remember that it’s always going to be a lot of effort, but the goal is to make the gains from your efforts as big as possible. 

                The other place where metacognition can be extremely beneficial to students is in gaining awareness of their mindset.  Are you an anxious test taker?  Do you procrastinate by doing some other busy work?  Are you rested well enough and fed well enough to pay attention in class?  By the time a deadline is looming, it’s plain as the nose on your face that you procrastinated, but recognizing that you’re doing it at the time is the metacognition part.  Memory loss is a cruelly ironic effect of test anxiety and meanwhile you’re just too wrapped up in being anxious to do anything about it.  Have your anxiety strategy ready and keep awareness of your state of mind.  When you feel like the wave of anxiety is starting to build up, then grab your coloring book and your headphones or look at cute kitten pictures before it crashes down with all that suffocating weight.  Turn some of your focus and attention to your thoughts and to your mindset. 

The stoic and disciplined students among us often force themselves to sit at their desk until they reach some arbitrary line that they’ve drawn for themselves, even if it doesn’t bring them any closer to their academic goals.  They are going to read for one hour whether it kills them or not.  If you’re one of these students, be careful not to let your diligence turn into stubbornness.  If you can turn your thoughts inward and see that you’re agitated, hungry, or distracted, then give yourself permission to break from your regiment and resolve your temperament to one that is ideal for achieving your primary goal… learning.  Knowing your own mind will help you make the decision about when resting is more beneficial to your progress than continuing to spin your wheels. 

To all the people who only read the summary paragraph, nice of you to join us.  What you missed in the rest of my letter was a reminder to turn your thoughts inward a bit to answer the questions: “What specifically am I doing to study?”, “Is it working?” and “Am I in the right mindset to learn effectively?”  The answers to those questions will be impetus to abandon those study efforts that give no gains and to adopt newer study efforts that are the best at accomplishing your goals.