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Intro:
Intro jingle
I’m Michelle and I am a rising senior from New Jersey and I will be your main host for today. On episode 8 of our podcast, I’ll be continuing our “TheMoreYouKnow” series that focuses on school-related topics. In this episode, I’ll be delving into metacognition and how that can be specifically implemented in your studying routine and education. I hope this episode is actually helpful and insightful in terms of advice and studying strategies. Onto the first segment!
Topic 1: What is Metacognition?
First of all, in the academic context of psychology, what does the term metacognition even mean?
In layman terms: thinking about how you think and learn → being self-aware about your thoughts and actions
The key to taking full advantage of metacognition in relation to learning is to constantly ask yourself self-reflective questions
These types of questions are really powerful and effective because self-reflection encourages us to take inventory of where we currently are in terms of what we already know, how we learn (what strategies work and what strategies do not), and where we want to be in terms of mastering the content
Basically, metacognition helps you to be a self-aware problem solver → you are in control of your learning and studying
By using metacognition when you study, you can be strategic about your approach
In the segment, I’ll be discussing some studies regarding metacognition
Topic 2: Research & Studies
Now, I’ll be going through some studies regarding metacognition and learning. Perhaps this overview that I will be providing you with will give you more insight into this whole notion of being aware of the way in which one learns
When it comes to strategizing the way in which we study, it is harder than it actually sounds. According to Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, “All too often, students just jump mindlessly into studying before they have even strategized what to use, without understanding why they are using each resource, and without planning out how they would use the resource to learn effectively. I find this very unfortunate b/c it undermines their own potential to learn well and perform well.”
However, according to a new study led by Chen, students can be taught to think metacognitively and strategically about their personal thinking and studying.
In this study, the researchers led by Chen carried out 2 field experiments in which some university students were provided a variety of prompts to aid in careful thinking about how they studied, and how they might study more effectively for an introductory statistics exam.
Another group of students, who were the control group, only received a reminder that their exam was coming up and that they should be preparing for it.
So, those who reflected on how they wanted to perform and what they should be doing to prepare and perform their best outperformed those who did not go through this self-reflection → by an average of ⅓ of a letter grade
Those who received the intervention prompts, the self-reflective prompts, performed twice as better than those who received it once
Read more about the field experiments in detail by going through the resources for this episode, which is on our website!
By now, there is a plethora of research out there about the importance of self-regulation and metacognition in one’s learning process. But now, the challenge is how to teach these skills in such a way that students will maintain and retain it. The beauty of Chen’s study was that her team was able to reach a conclusion that through surveys, this metacognitive process could be taught—in a relatively simple and efficient manner.
In another study conducted by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), metacognition and feedback are the two most effective educational intervention methods. In one specific experiment, 12 and 13 year olds were able to significantly improve their writing skills by learning to better evaluate the quality of their own work. These kids, from 23 primary schools across West Yorkshire, England, were split into 2 groups: half were given guidance on how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their writing (self-regulation - instead of relying on teacher, but improving the writing on their own) the other half were the control group, given no intervention / guidance
While this finding seems very intuitive, goal-setting and planning is imperative to achieving improvement in our studies. The great thing about these metacognitive interventions is that they are not expensive—we can all start to implement these in our lives —for free!
The last research study that I will mention in this segment was conducted by Danielle Sussan and Lisa Son of the Psychology Department at Columbia University.
In this study, the researchers tested whether a monitoring ability could be improved above spontaneous improvement. They tested if this ability could be developed through explicit teaching.
The participants in study were 5 to 6 years old. They were trained to monitor their memories by making confidence judgments through the process of placing bets.
Basically, through a picture memory task, the kids either made high or low bets to indicate their confidence in their memory responses. Half of the participants were explicitly taught how to bet properly, whereas the control group, the other half, was not.
The results indicated that during the teaching of the participants how to bet appropriately, the participants demonstrated a general monitoring ability. In addition, the group who were taught how to monitor themselves explicitly performed in the subsequent task. Therefore, we can conclude that teaching the process of monitoring, which is basically being able to differentiate the learnability of different topics and contents, can be taught to young kids as well, not just the teen/adult demographic.
In the next segment, I’ll be giving some studying tips that are informed by metacognition studies.
Topic 3: Strategies & Tips
Now, I’ll be discussing some strategies and tips for studying and learning that are informed by metacognition studies.
The first thing: use your syllabus! If you are given one, that is
This is how you can strategically plan out how you will study for that specific class.
I personally like classes that are pre-planned out by the teacher—most high school teachers at my school do not have syllabuses for the whole year, but they do tell us upcoming assessments ahead of time, so I have to work with this. Anyhow, knowing these things ahead of time, allows for ample time to at least mentally prepare and plan.
Another practice is to actively utilize your prior knowledge.
Before attending a lecture or reading a textbook for the first time, look at the topic to be covered, and ask yourself what you already know. From here, you can determine what you are curious about. Answering these questions while you read, will give context to what you are going to read.
I often find myself engaging more with material that I have prior knowledge in—I only really practice this when I am learning something that I have interest in and therefore ample prior knowledge about. But, it goes to show that doing this practice is effective in thinking more deeply about the material at hand. This is something that I personally will try to implement more frequently when I am learning something new for the first time.
The next tip is to think aloud.
Pretty simple, just talk through your notes or talk to your classmates, friends, and teachers about the content.
Verbalizing your thoughts can help you make more sense of the material and internalize it more effectively.
As a person who loves interacting with people, I love engaging with material in this manner. A great thing about this tip is that when you start talking about a certain topic, you will realize what you are iffy on and what you should study more. This is a great tip that utilizes self-regulation and monitoring—metacognitive strategies!
The next tip is to ask self-reflective questions.
Self-reflective questions are so important to the whole field of metacognition.
I think that taking some time to introspect and ponder about your personal level of comprehension of the material is really important.
While I don’t do this consciously, I can kind of just determine what is working, what I don’t know, and what might work in helping me learn.
When I was younger, some of my teachers actually had these exit tickets and asked questions like:
What did you learn today?
What is confusing about this topic?
What are some connections I can make between concepts?
Now I realize this was the teachers’ way of using metacognition. Perhaps I can also start doing this for myself as well to be more strategic about what to prioritize when I study and focusing my studying time on what I don’t know.
The next piece of advice is to organize your thoughts.
Creating concept maps or graphic organizers are a great way to visualize the material and see the connections between the concepts you are learning.
Creating concept maps from memory is also great for self-testing.
Personally, I make concept maps for my humanities classes. While it definitely is time-consuming, I like the end result and the easiness of being able to glean a ton of information and connections just with a quick glance.
Now, for the sake of time, I’ll be just listing some more tips.
Take notes from memory → make notetaking an active activity, not a passive one
You will prioritize what you don’t know over what you already know
Review prior exams
Strategy-wise this is also just smart because teachers will give exam questions in a format that have been using
Great to look over why you make errors and where you need more work on
Test yourself
This is self-testing
You definitely do not want to try questions out for the first time during your exam!
Figure out how you learn
There are various tests on the internet about learning styles - try it out
I personally am a mix of many and I adapt to each class and subject (humanities / stem) But the the bottom line is, study for each class the way in which you retain the information the best → you want to optimize your performance
I hope that was helpful! Now we’ll be moving on to the outro!
Outro:
In today’s episode of “A POP of Psych,” we went over the definition of metacognition, some metacognition research, and concluded with some hopefully helpful advice.
As always, thanks for tuning in and check out the script and resources used on our website, which will be linked in the podcast description. Also, please give us a (preferably) nice rating / review on Apple Podcasts! It really helps us get the word out!
We’ll be back next week with another informative and engaging episode!
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