Keynotes
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Metacognitive knowledge In recent years, research in the field of metacognition has focused primarily on procedural metacognition or metacognitive skills, assuming that metacognition should be measured concurrently, i.e. by studying it online. While this approach is well justified, it cannot replace research on metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive knowledge (declarative metamemory according to Flavell) refers to people’s explicit, conscious, and factual knowledge about the importance of knowledge about strategy-, person-, and task-variables (and their interaction) for cognitive performance. Metacognitive knowledge is a prerequisite for reflective and strategic learning: A person who intelligently uses a particular strategy ought to have some metacognitive knowledge of that strategy, and a person who does not use the strategy is expected to less knowledgeable. It is be argued that measuring students’ metacognitive knowledge in a test-like format, covering both knowledge about the nature of cognitive tasks as well as knowledge about strategies for coping with such tasks and for meeting the tasks demands (metatask and metastrategic knowledge according to Kuhn) does overcome some of the well known shortcomings of self-report data on the frequency or intensity of strategy use. The argument will be supported using data from different studies, each of them containing measures on students’ metacognitive knowledge, on students’ performance on achievement tests and partly also on self-reported strategy use. Based on cross-sectional data from the recent PISA-assessment, structural equivalence as well as the generalizability of findings on students’ metacognitive knowledge across countries will be studied. In addition, respective data from a longitudinal study (Schneider and Artelt) on metacognitive development will be presented, aiming at disentangling the effects of metacognition and subject matter knowledge. Finally, the theoretical as well as practical implications of valid assessments of metacognitive knowledge will be discussed. |
Janet Metcalfe (Columbia University New York, USA)
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Metacognition of Agency Author:The question addressed by this research is how does a person know that he or she is the agent? According to many, the knowledge that one is, oneself, the actor (or the thinker) is simply a given. It is direct knowledge. This is what Ryle called the “Official Doctrine”. In contrast to this view, I will argue that knowing that one is the agent is a metacognitive judgment. All researchers in metacognition agree that all of the metacognitive judgments that have been studied to date -- including judgments of learning, feelings of knowing, tips of the tongue, ease of learning judgments -- are based on cues. If our knowledge of our own agency is also a metacognition it, too, should be based on cues. I will discuss the cues upon which our metacognition of agency appears to be based. I will also present data on the brain basis of these cues. These data indicate that there is a distinction between online feelings of agency and retrospective judgments about agency. Finally, I will discuss some of the variability among people in these judgments. It will be concluded that this highly variable, cue-dependent metaknowledge, that allows us to know when and to what extent we are the agent, is not to be incontrovertible direct knowledge suggested by the Official Doctrine. |
David Whitebread (University of Cambridge, UK)
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The Self-Regulating Brain: the Emergence & Development of Metacognition in Young Children This lecture will review recent and current research, carried out by the Cambridge SRL Research Group and others, which has clearly established that metacognitive abilities, or their precursors, are identifiable in the performance of very young children. This work is significant in two ways. First, it casts new light on a number of existing controversies within the field. These include debates about the distinction between cognitive and metacognitive processes, the role of implicit learning and consciousness in metacognitive processes, about the broadening of the conception of metacognition into self-regulation, incorporating affective and motivational as well as purely cognitive processes, and about the appropriate assessment and measurement of metacognitive achievements. Second, the identification of metacognitive processes, and their precursors, in very young children’s cognitive activity, requires us to look again at processes and models of development. For example, recent research using methodologies from neuroscience is exploring linkages between the emergence of metacognitive activity and executive functions in the young human brain. Other research exploring infant-parent interactions in joint problem-solving has provided early examples of metacognitive processes. Research representing the new resurgence of interest in the self-regulatory role of private speech has also produced intriguing findings. These new research developments raise the possibility for early detection of metacognitive deficits in young children. They also support a radical shift in developmental models, away from the earlier view of metacognitive and self-regulatory skills as late-developing achievements of cognitive development, and towards the contrasting view that self-monitoring and self-regulation are, in fact, fundamental attributes of the human brain from birth, and that they, in turn, fundamentally determine the nature of development. |