Metacognition, Week 2
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Transcript of Metacognition, Week 2
Metacognition, Week 2Discussion questions, Brown & Smiley 1978
Discussion questions1. If one considers these three chapters as "snapshots"
of the field of metacognition, how has the terrain changed over the last 3 decades?
2. In what ways can you map his claims about learning to solve problems in math onto phenomena (learning or other) in your area of interest?
3. What happens when you apply Paris's functional perspective on motivation to Schoenfeld's description of teaching his students to be metacognitive in math problem-solving? (Does it add explanatory power? does it miss important aspects?)
4. What jumped out at you when reading these chapters?
Brown & Smiley, 1978in Child Development
Three descriptive studies of study strategy use by readers of various ages
Earlier lab-task studies found that even young children selectively attend to most important aspects of stimuli BUT
Younger children not as good at separating important from unimportant
These studies extend this idea to a more realistic and educationally relevant task: studying to remember text
Method Materials (all three studies) Two Japanese folk tales, roughly equivalent
in Interestingness Readability (5th grade per Dale-Chall index) Length Number of “idea units”
Idea unit importance pre-assigned (one quarter to each importance level)
Experiment 1 Subjects: 80 college students paid $2 Groups: IntentionalIncidental
Immediate recall
Delayed recall
Procedure First variable manipulated:
Half told the goal was to recall (intentional) Half told they would comment on how useful the
stories would be for moral education (incidental) Listen to story while reading printed version Second variable manipulated:
Half given immediate recall (write as much as you can remember)
Half given 5-minutes to either write an evaluation of the text (incidental) or study (intentional)
Analysis: 3-way ANOVA Independent variables
Incidental vs intentional Immediate vs delay Importance level
Dependent variable #Thought units (T-units) recalled
p. 1079 3-way interaction, p<.005
Study 2 Goal: Replicate study 1, see if students
improve own recall if given extra time to study 40 additional college students Same materials Stories counterbalanced (half got “cat” on day
1, half “dragon”; reversed on day 2)
Procedure (study 2)
Day 1 All told they would recall gist of story Listen to & read story as before 5-min interpolated task (word puzzle) Attempted gist recall Given 5 more minutes to study (given
notepads, highlighters, etc.)
Procedure, cont.Day 2 Listen to & read story as before 5-min interpolated task (word puzzle) Attempted gist recall Manipulation: Half told “it helps some people
to underline or take notes and you may do that if you want to”
Given 5 more minutes to study (given notepads, highlighters, etc.)
Analysis: 3-way ANOVA Independent Variables:
Immediate vs delay (within-subjects) Prompt vs no-prompt Importance level
Dependent variable #Thought units (T-units) recalled
No effects involving story/day or sex, data collapsed (same for all three studies)
Immed/dely
Immediate-delay X Importance p<.001
Study 3: Development 3 age groups
51 young (5th grade) 85 middle (7th & 8th grade) 59 old(11th & 12th grade)
Same materials and procedure, except Pre-training on procedure with 2 other fairy tales Heard story twice No retention interval with interpolated task
Spontaneous vs prompted Inspected texts for signs of note-taking and
underlining, compared prompted vs spontaneous use. Spontaneous underlining in all three age groups Spontaneous note-taking in two older groups
How much underlining, of which units?
How much did it help?
Brown & Smiley’s interpretation As children mature they can increasingly
predict What are the essential organizing features and
crucial elements of text Make increasingly good use of study time.
From 7th grade on, selectively allocated study to important information
Oldest kids more sensitive to levels of importance
Brown & Smiley’s interpretation, cont Telling kids to use strategies
Increased strategy use BUT had no effect on recall
Methodological implications of the above Combining data from spontaneous and non-
spontaneous strategy users may have washed out effects of strategy use in other studies
Brown & Smiley’s interpretationTheoretical implications Previous work on isolated lab tasks asking kids to
predict their recall (e.g., of lists of words) is problematic developmentally Less aware Less able to recall or predict metacognitive stuff
Argues for tasks where strategy use, metacognition, and study effectiveness studied together Avoids self-reports Reflects real connections among aspects of metacognition
& text knowledge