Which of the following refers to the thinking or mental processes that go on as we process and store things that can become knowledge?
Show
Cognitive psychologists, sometimes called brain scientists, study how the human brain works — how we think, remember and learn. They apply psychological science to understand how we perceive events and make decisions. Understanding Brain Science and Cognitive PsychologyThe human brain is an amazing and powerful tool. It allows us to learn, see, remember, hear, perceive, understand and create language. Sometimes, the human brain also fails us. Cognitive psychologists study how people acquire, perceive, process and store information. This work can range from exploring how we learn language to understanding the interplay between cognition and emotion. New technologies like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allow researchers to see a picture of the brain at work — helping them to understand how a brain reacts to a particular stimulus or how differences in brain structure can affect a person’s health, personality or cognitive functioning. Brain Science and Cognitive Psychology AppliedBrain science and cognitive psychology is one of the most versatile psychological specialty areas today — and one of the most in demand. All professions have a compelling interest in how the brain works. Educators, curriculum designers, engineers, scientists, judges, public health and safety officials, architects and graphic designers all want to know more about how the brain processes information. Their research and its resulting applications have become an integral part of how organizations, schools and businesses function and succeed. In clinical settings, cognitive psychologists seek to treat issues related to human mental processes, including Alzheimer’s disease, speech issues, memory loss and sensory or perception difficulties. Last updated: May 2022Date created: January 2014 Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Thinking about One’s Thinking | Putting Metacognition into
Practice Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one’s thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and
learner. Initially studied for its development in young children (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1985), researchers soon began to look at how experts display metacognitive thinking and how, then, these thought processes can be taught to novices to improve their learning (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986). In How People Learn, the National Academy of Sciences’ synthesis of decades of research on the science of learning, one of the three key findings of this work is the effectiveness of a “‘metacognitive’ approach to instruction” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 18). Metacognitive practices increase students’ abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991). They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter: they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts. When Pintrich (2002) asserts that “Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them” (p. 222), notice the students must “know about” these strategies, not just practice them. As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a “conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]” (p. 179). Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc. A key element is recognizing the limit of one’s knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to “actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67). The absence of metacognition connects to the research by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger on “Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence” (2003). They found that “people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence,” lacking “insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills.” They identified this pattern across domains—from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters’ knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians’ knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills (p. 83-84). In short, “if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong” (p. 85). This research suggests that increased metacognitive abilities—to learn specific (and correct) skills, how to recognize them, and how to practice them—is needed in many contexts. Putting Metacognition into PracticeIn “Promoting Student Metacognition,” Tanner (2012) offers a handful of specific activities for biology classes, but they can be adapted to any discipline. She first describes four assignments for explicit instruction (p. 116):
Next are recommendations for developing a “classroom culture grounded in metacognition” (p. 116-118):
To facilitate these activities, she also offers three useful tables:
Weimer’s “Deep Learning vs. Surface Learning: Getting Students to Understand the Difference” (2012) offers additional recommendations for developing students’ metacognitive awareness and improvement of their study skills: “[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and concerted ways we make students aware of themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not only ‘What are you learning?’ but ‘How are you learning?’ We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches.” (emphasis added) She points to a tool developed by Stanger-Hall (2012, p. 297) for her students to identify their study strategies, which she divided into “cognitively passive” (“I previewed the reading before class,” “I came to class,” “I read the assigned text,” “I highlighted the text,” et al) and “cognitively active study behaviors” (“I asked myself: ‘How does it work?’ and ‘Why does it work this way?’” “I wrote my own study questions,” “I fit all the facts into a bigger picture,” “I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered,” et al). The specific focus of Stanger-Hall’s study is tangential to this discussion,1 but imagine giving students lists like hers adapted to your course and then, after a major assignment, having students discuss which ones worked and which types of behaviors led to higher grades. Even further, follow Lovett’s advice (2013) by assigning “exam wrappers,” which include students reflecting on their previous exam-preparation strategies, assessing those strategies and then looking ahead to the next exam, and writing an action plan for a revised approach to studying. A common assignment in English composition courses is the self-assessment essay in which students apply course criteria to articulate their strengths and weaknesses within single papers or over the course of the semester. These activities can be adapted to assignments other than exams or essays, such as projects, speeches, discussions, and the like. As these examples illustrate, for students to become more metacognitive, they must be taught the concept and its language explicitly (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), though not in a content-delivery model (simply a reading or a lecture) and not in one lesson. Instead, the explicit instruction should be “designed according to a knowledge construction approach,” or students need to recognize, assess, and connect new skills to old ones, “and it needs to take place over an extended period of time” (Zohar & David, p. 187). This kind of explicit instruction will help students expand or replace existing learning strategies with new and more effective ones, give students a way to talk about learning and thinking, compare strategies with their classmates’ and make more informed choices, and render learning “less opaque to students, rather than being something that happens mysteriously or that some students ‘get’ and learn and others struggle and don’t learn” (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223). Metacognition instruction should also be embedded with the content and activities about which students are thinking. Why? Metacognition is “not generic” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 19) but instead is most effective when it is adapted to reflect the specific learning contexts of a specific topic, course, or discipline (Zohar & David, 2009). In explicitly connecting a learning context to its relevant processes, learners will be more able to adapt strategies to new contexts, rather than assume that learning is the same everywhere and every time. For instance, students’ abilities to read disciplinary texts in discipline-appropriate ways would also benefit from metacognitive practice. A literature professor may read a passage of a novel aloud in class, while also talking about what she’s thinking as she reads: how she makes sense of specific words and phrases, what connections she makes, how she approaches difficult passages, etc. This kind of modeling is a good practice in metacognition instruction, as suggested by Tanner above. Concepción’s “Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition” (2004) includes his detailed “How to Read Philosophy” handout (pp. 358-367), which includes the following components:
What would such a handout look like for your discipline? Students can even be metacognitively prepared (and then prepare themselves) for the overarching learning experiences expected in specific contexts. Salvatori and Donahue’s The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (2004) encourages students to embrace difficult texts (and tasks) as part of deep learning, rather than an obstacle. Their “difficulty paper” assignment helps students reflect on and articulate the nature of the difficulty and work through their responses to it (p. 9). Similarly, in courses with sensitive subject matter, a different kind of learning occurs, one that involves complex emotional responses. In “Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses” (Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, 2009), students were informed about the common reactions to learning about racial inequality (Helms, 1995; Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; see student handout, Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, p. 23-24) and then regularly wrote about their cognitive and affective responses to specific racialized situations. The students with the most developed metacognitive and meta-affective practices at the end of the semester were able to “clear the obstacles and move away from” oversimplified thinking about race and racism ”to places of greater questioning, acknowledging the complexities of identity, and redefining the world in racial terms” (p. 14). Ultimately, metacognition requires students to “externalize mental events” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67), such as what it means to learn, awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses with specific skills or in a given learning context, plan what’s required to accomplish a specific learning goal or activity, identifying and correcting errors, and preparing ahead for learning processes. ———————— 1 Students who were tested with short answer in addition to multiple-choice questions on their exams reported more cognitively active behaviors than those tested with just multiple-choice questions, and these active behaviors led to improved performance on the final exam. References
This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Photo credit: wittygrittyinvisiblegirl via Compfight cc Photo Credit: Helga Weber via Compfight cc Photo Credit: fiddle oak via Compfight cc Which term refers to the thinking or mental processes that go on as we process and store things that can become knowledge?Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension. Some of the many different cognitive processes include thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving.
Which term refers to the thinking or mental processes that go on as we process and store things that can become knowledge a affect B internalization C cognition D synergy?Personal influences. C. Which of the following terms refers to the thinking or mental processes that go on as we process and store things that can become knowledge? a. Cognition.
Which term refers to the feelings that are experienced during consumption activities or associated with specific objects?Affect- Refers to the feelings experienced during consumption activities or associated with specific objects.
What is the process by which goods services or ideas are used and transformed into value?Consumption represents the process by which goods, services, or ideas are used and transformed into value. The basic consumer behavior process includes steps that begin with consumer needs and finish with value.
|