Metacognition

1. Metacognition Neil H. Schwartz Psych 605

2. Three Terms: Organizing the Concept Piaget Spence Flavell Bandura Endogenous Constructivism Exogenous Constructivism Metacognition Self-Regulation Self-regulated Learning Dialectical Constructivism

3. Conceptual Anchoring • Endogenous Constructivism • Reflective abstraction of new or existing cognitive structures. • Inside the head • Emphasizes learner development instead of learner-environment interactions • Exogenous Constructivism • Interaction of the person with their environment. • Outside the head • Emphasizes reciprocal determinism of the environment on the person– mediated through behavior. • Involves evaluations of performance, personal standards, valuations of activities, and attributions. • Dialectical Constructivsm • Combines Endogenous and Exogenous constructivism • Inside and outside the head. • Both Endo and Exo features exist in a relation of reciprocal constraint and facilitation. • Endo and Exo are NOT mutually exclusive.

4. Metacognition Inside the Head Flavell Monitoring Control Self-regulatory Mechanisms or Metacognitive Control Processes Knowledge of Cognition Metacognition Others Checking the Outcome Planning Monitoring Effectiveness Testing Revising Evaluating Strategies Cognitive monitoring Awareness of Comprehension Monitoring of task performance during the process of performing

5. Self Regulated Learning: Winne & Hadwin • Learning occurs in 4 phases • Defining tasks • Setting goals and making plans • Using tactics to study • Making adaptations to metacognition • Each phase is completed in terms of: • Conditions • Operations • Products • Evaluations • Standards C O P E S

6. Conditions: Of the Task Conditions: Of the Learner • Beliefs and dispositions • Factors of motivation • Knowledge of the domain • Knowledge of the task • Knowledge of tactics and strategies • Resources • Instructional cues • Time • Social Context

7. Operations Standards • Criteria that a student believes is the end state of a learning phase. • Allows the student to know when a learning phase is over or complete. • The actual processes used to manipulate information. • They include searching, monitoring, assembling, rehearsing, translating, etc. • They are not metacognitive, but rather cognitive. • They result in cognitive products; that is, information for a particular stage.

8. Products Evaluations • These are cognitive evaluations of the fit between the standards and the products. • Evaluations are metacognitive and iterative • They manifest differently in each phase. • What a student produces from the recursive interaction of Standards, Operations, & Evaluations • Different products are produced in each of the four phases. • Products are the things that a student takes with him from the task– e. g. understanding Winne’s model..

9. Conscious vs. Automatic Processes Metacognition and Cognition • Metacognition is a higher order agent overlooking and governing cognition • Metacognition draws on cognition • Metacognitive knowledge is based on domain-specific knowledge. • Metacognition is typically private and unavailable to an observer. • Most metacognitive processes are automatic. • They become conscious when an error occurs. • When they are first learned or deployed, they are intentional and typically conscious.

10. Developmental Processes Domain General vs. Specific • The jury is still out on whether metacognitive skills are domain general or specific. • Metacognition is related to theory of mind and intelligence. • But, intelligence and metacognition are not the same thing. • Metacognition develops first in separate domains and later becomes generalized across domains.

11. Metacognition: A Simple View

12. Metacognition: A Neuroscience View Interdependent top-down function of cognitive control

13. Prefrontal Cortex: Cortical Monitoring & Control • Cognitive control is a top-down function for each of the integral working memory functions, monitored and controlled by the prefrontal cortex. • The prefrontal cortex implements three interdependent functions of cognitive control—

14. Prefrontal Cortex: Cortical Monitoring & Control • Maintenance: • Is the process of holding, in an active form, a limited amount of task-relevant information supplied by a preceding event. • Appears to be the result of neurological patterns of activation borne from specific external inputs oscillating in a recurrent loop between multiple networks of prefrontal and other cortical cells in regions of the brain that are specialized for the nature of the input (Ranganath, 2006). • Attentional Control: • Is the top-down selective activation of the representations of task-relevant stimuli and their corresponding responses;. • Appears to operate in a biasing and competitive fashion where neuronal responses of the prefrontal cortex bias neuronal responses in posterior parts of the brain, creating a competition of activation and suppression for the task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli, respectively, required for task performance (Miller & Cohen, 2001). • Integration: • Is the combination and reorganization of information from different sources in the service of controlling the execution of a task. • Appears to be a hierarchically arranged deployment of control, cascading down from super-ordinate prefrontal cortical modules specialized for large-scale integration, to subordinate modules that are relatively specialized for processing simple tasks. (Koechlin, Ody & Kouneiher, 2003).

15. Prefrontal Cortex & Cortical Control • There appear to be a least two types of these top-down signals—one that serves to enhance, and another that serves to suppress, task-relevant information(D’Esposito,2007). • These types of signals are important because enhancement and suppression mechanisms may actually exist to control both cognitive and metacognitive functions (Knight et al. 199; Shimamura, 2000). • It is well documented that excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms are pervasively interleaved throughout the nervous system, in spinal reflexes, cerebellar outputs, and basal ganglia movement control networks, etc.—indeed, at multiple levels throughout the entire neuroaxis. • That means “by generating contrast via both enhancements and suppressions… top-down signals bias the likelihood of successful representation of relevant information in a competitive system” (D’Esposito, 2006, p.768). • In short, the top-down function and the biasing effect within the context of a competitive system could be a compelling way to think about a neurological explanation of metacognitive monitoring and control.

16. Metacognition: A Neuroscience View Metacognitive monitoring and control: A closed neurocognitive loop