This post is a rough summary of John Flavell’s work, “Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring: A New Area of Cognitive—Developmental Inquiry” (Oct 1979, American Psychologist). Like all my posts, this is intended just for me, but if it is helpful for anyone else, that would make me happy 🙂
Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring: (1979)
A New Area of Cognitive—Developmental Inquiry
John M. Flavell (Stanford University)
In this paper, Flavell maps out his hypothesis for metacognition and cognitive monitoring. This is the first paper that brought metacognition as ‘thing’ in psych.
Metacognition plays an important role in oral communication of information, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, reading comprehension, writing, language acquisition, attention, memory, problem solving, social cognition, and, various types of self-control and self-instruction.
Flavell’s proposed Model for Cognitive Monitoring consists in interactions between the following phenomena:
- metacognitive knowledge stored world knowledge that has to do with people (including self) as cognitive creatures
- e.g. “I am better at arithmetic than spelling.”
- metacognitive experiences conscious cognitive or affective experiences that accompany and pertain to an intellectual enterprise
- e.g. the feeling of not understanding X
- goals (or tasks) objectives of a cognitive enterprise
- actions (or strategies) cognitions or other behaviors employed to achieve them
Metacognitive knowledge consists in: knowledge or beliefs about what factors or variables act and interact in what ways to affect the course and outcome of cognitive enterprises.
3 major categories:
- person nature of yourself and others as cognitive processors
- intraindividual differences
- “I learn better by listening than by reading.”
- interindividual differences
- “Friend A is more socially sentive than B.”
- universals of cognition
- “There are various degrees and kinds of understanding.”
- Ways to fail understanding X:
- not grasp any representation of X
- misunderstand X
- intraindividual differences
- task information available to you during a cognitive enterprise
- abundant/meager, familiar/unfamiliar, redundant/densely packed, well/poorly organized, delivered in this manner or at that pace, interesting/dull, trustworthy/untrustworthy, and so on
- the understanding of what the above variations imply for how the cognitive enterprise should best be managed and how successful you are likely to be in achieving its goal
- strategy what strategies are likely to be effective in achieving what subgoals and goals in what sorts of cognitive undertakings?
- and these three’s interactions and combinations
Flavell assumes that metacognitive knowledge is not fundamentally different from other knowledge stored in long-term memory, and thus may be activated deliberately/consciously or unintentionally/automatically.
Metacognitive knowledge is important because:
- it can lead you to select, evaluate, revise, and abandon cognitive tasks, goals, and strategies in light of their relationships with one another and with your own abilities and interests with respect to that enterprise
- it can lead to metacognitive experiences and can help you interpret the meaning and behavioral implications of these metacognitive experiences
Metacognitive experiences consist in: conscious cognitive or affective experiences that accompany and pertain to an intellectual enterprise
“My present guess is that metacognitive experiences are especially likely to occur in situations that stimulate a lot of careful, highly conscious thinking: in a job or school task that expressly demands that kind of thinking; in novel roles or situations, where every major step you take requires planning beforehand and evaluation afterwards; where decisions and actions are at once weighty and risky; where high affective arousal or other inhibitors of reflective thinking are absent.”
Metacognitive experiences are important because:
- it can lead you to establish new goals and to revise or abandon old ones
- it can affect your metacognitive knowledge base by adding to it, deleting from it, or revising it.
- it can activate strategies aimed at cognitive/metacognitive goals
Cognitive strategies are invoked to make cognitive progress, metacognitive strategies to monitor it.
Developmental and Educational Implications & Further Questions:
- child development hypotheses “to try to discover the early competencies that serve as building blocks for subsequent acquisitions”
- how much good does cognitive monitoring Actually do us in various types of cognitive enterprises?
- might it not even do more harm than good, especially if used in excess or nonselectively? (e.g. neurotic/obsessive)
- “I am absolutely convinced that there is, overall, far too little rather than enough or too much cognitive monitoring in this world.”
- children who do more cognitive monitoring should learn better both in and out of school than children who do less
- increasing the quantity and quality of children’s metacognitive knowledge and monitoring skills through systematic training may be feasible as well as desirable
- could result in “a method of teaching children (and adults) to make wise and thoughtful life decisions as well as to comprehend and learn better in formal educational settings”
