Metacognition Week 4 - Reflection

This week we dug more deeply into the topic of three types of metacognitive monitoring -- Judgment of Learning, Feeling of Knowing, and Ease of Learning. Since JoL has been studied extensively, it represents much of what we know about metacognitive monitoring in modern scientific literature. However, JoL, FoK and EoL are positively but weakly correlated, so it seems fairly likely that there are multiple or more complex mechanisms in place here. This makes me think that this is an area where our models and techniques will undergo significant change -- as we seek to "hack our brains" to live in an ever-more-complex environment. The work studying JoL seems very preliminary despite being an area of focus for the field recently. I say this because although there are interesting theories about whether people are using their ease-of-processing, retrieval-fluency, and/or cue utilization abilities, it seems like the strategic approach to the task would vary from person to person, and that their overall level of self-awareness and study skills would be cross-cutting through all of these hypotheses. I wonder if there is an element of pattern recognition as well; in your brain, do you get a strong "I've got this" feeling, or is it more like "enough of this one" that causes people to move on. I think the experiment that coaches people to employ a given memory technique is particularly interesting. I was particularly interested in the "Region of Proximal Learning" hypothesis, because it echoes my experience and seems highly practical for teachers to adopt -- to identify the next "stretch goal" and then support students through it, time and time again. It works for sports and it seems very effective for brains as well. Thinking so much about thinking and learning makes me much more conscious of these processes at work in my brain as well as my children's brains. I still have many questions. I wonder how national origin/culture relates to metacognition -- cultures that value memorization, cultures that value intense meditation/reflection, and so forth -- if our sample set included a much wider representative sample of human variation, we might come to different conclusions about what's universal. I wonder how ADD/ADHD fits into this picture; is metacognitive control a challenge for people struggling with attention deficit? Can metacognition help people struggling to keep their brains on task? I find it interesting that ADD/ADHD sufferers seem to have an opposite response to caffeine -- it makes them more focused. I find myself drawn again and again to the middle "memory maintenance" zone, wherein the only advice is to rehearse our knowledge. Combined with statistics that talk about people only retaining some small fraction of what they see and hear, I find myself suspecting that these are really important subjects that are worth more study than they've received. And I still haven't heard anything about instinct and the distinctions that might be drawn between memory of facts/details versus memory of overall themes versus the learning of skills/techniques/algorithms.