About 3 years ago I decided to begin the year with a single lesson that explained to students how learning works. I used the Willingham model of memory and learning, working memory, long-term memory, and forgetting1.
I did it with all my classes. The above diagram2 gave us a common language for how we talked about what was happening in the classroom. Later iterations of the ‘start of the year lesson’ included more about the importance of attention.
Fast forward 3 years and find myself puzzling about metacognition.
It’s gaining popularity, certainly in the UK, less so in the US, and being widely promoted as the thing that will make a huge difference to the students in your classroom. The research seems to bear this out3. Along the lines of ‘if they know about metacognition, they will be better learners, they will know the strategies that work and use them, and they will make more academic progress.’ An educational ‘Ozempic’.
However, it is not immediately obvious what people mean when they say metacognition or being metacognitive. The common definition is ‘thinking about thinking’, but often is exemplified by strategies that the students apply to studying. Only occasionally is reference made to the fact that they need to know about how learning and memory works.
My intention in the ‘start of the year lesson’ was simply to give students basic information about the brain. I realize now that I had been doing the first part of a model of metacognition described by Schraw and Moshman. (1995)4. The model involves declarative knowledge (knowing what) and procedural knowledge (knowing how). Here is an example of the two types of knowledge in relation to brushing your teeth:
| Declarative knowledge | Procedural knowledge |
| Knowing that brushing removes plaque, prevents cavities, keeps gums healthy, should be done twice a day. | How to brush effectively to cover all teeth and gums, the angle and pressure to use, how much toothpaste to use, rinsing. |
Back to metacognition::
- Declarative metacognitive knowledge = what you know about learning
- Procedural metacognitive knowledge = knowing which strategies to use, when, and why.
I had provided my students with the declarative metacognitive knowledge that they needed to help them to understand the benefits of the strategies (procedural metacognitive knowledge) I’d talk about later.
Did it help? There was certainly a lot of positive feedback, virtually no pushback about the large amount of work they got (SLOP, or Shed Loads Of Practice), and the older students were really quite bemused by the fact that, on the eve of their AP (A level) exams, they found themselves without the need to cram or even review very much. Because what they needed for the exam was all in their long-term memory.
Takeaways
- Metacognition can be helpfully thought of as two things: knowing how we learn, knowing how to maximise your efforts given how we learn.
- Teaching students both aspects of metacognition is a useful endeavour.
- Sometimes you’re already doing things that would be advisable in terms of cognitive science, and you don’t even know it.
You can find out more at my researchED Denver session on metacognition! If that’s not available to you I’ll be posting a summary here after the event.
Postscript
In the original talk I also included a bit from Dan Siegel about dopamine and the idea that teenagers are at an age where number of dopamine receptors in their brains is increasing at the greatest rate. This has some significant implications, which he describes in very many podcasts and books5.
It could explain the risk-taking behaviour of teenagers, or even why they think lots of things are boring. Having learned about this, a 17-year-old student told me she was sitting in a math(s) lesson and realized she was bored. Remembering about dopamine, she started to think about what she was going to do after school with her friends and how exciting that would be. She then discovered that the math(s) lesson really wasn’t so boring after all!
What can I say. Sample size of one.
References:
- Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. Jossey-Bass
- Oliver Cavaglioli’s diagram https://www.olicav.com/#/diagrams/
- https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/metacognition
- Schraw, G., & Moshman, D. (1995). Metacognitive theories. Educational psychology review, 7, 351-371.
- Toth, B. (2022). Differential dopamine dynamics in adolescents and adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 42(14), 2853–2855. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2492-21.2022
Dan Siegel: https://drdansiegel.com/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGcFqzZYJxQ ,
It's a Learning Curve 
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