D&M Concept Review Ch 10

1 - What mental abilities are measured by theory-of-mind tasks?
Theory-of-mind tasks measure whether or not someone understands that someone's state of mind or knowledge can differ from reality, and that another individual's understanding may differ from their own. It includes understanding that there is such a thing as separation between their mind and someone else's, and recognizing people can be deceived -- and that they themselves are capable of that deception. Theory of mind is a metacognitive monitoring capability because it is an indication of someone's awareness of the existence of their own thinking. It is also a metacognitive control capability, because it requires that someone suppress false signals (such as the fact that you know something that the character in a story does not know) in order to arrive at the correct conclusion.

2 - Metacognitive theory explains that young children have difficulties passing theory of mind tasks because this part of their mind has not sufficiently developed yet. There seems to be an inflection point, a moment where these pieces come together. Some metacognitive abilities surface earlier and grow gradually. That part of the brain may not have finished developing.

3 - what accounts for developmental improvement? Monitoring of learning, monitoring of retrieval, or the use of strategies? Strategy use/effectiveness seems to increase in tandem with metacognitive activity. Children show monitoring of learning and retrieval even when very young.

4 - Wishful-thinking hypothesis
This states that children may give poorly-calibrated answers to JOL tasks because they are describing what they want to achieve rather than what is in their brain. This does not fully explain overconfidence, however, since JOL of others was also poorly calibrated. Overconfidence has an adaptive potential function by challenging children to attempt tasks that are beyond their reach, which promotes learning and growth.

D&M Ch 10 Discussion Questions

1 - Metacognitive task with two balls, a ball, and play-doh jars.

• theory of mind -- hide the ball, then move it, when one of the dolls isn't looking
• Ask the kid to remember the items, first the names, then the names and looking at them, then the names and playing with them
• mold the play-doh into shapes. What is this? (bird) Is this really a bird? (no)

Since Tristan is 5, I would expect him to pass the theory of mind and appearance-reality tests. If not, it may be that he has not yet developed the idea that other minds are separate from his own.

2 - Monitoring -- contexts when children are good at judging their learning and/or retrieval.

Younger children did not seem to choose strategies on memory tests, and had overconfidence, even after many trials. Rudimentary metacognitive capabilities seem to exist but have not fully developed.

D&M Ch 10 - Childhood Development

Ch 10 - Childhood Development

Development of Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to "attribute mental states to ourselves and to other people".

Includes:

• understanding mental states and beliefs (false beliefs, emotions, desires)
• understanding others may have different beliefs
• understanding what it means "to know" and "to forget"

These abilities let us predict the behaviors of others. Animals seem able to predict behavior...ToM or pattern recognition??

How to Measure the Progress of ToM

Key factor: ability to demonstrate an understanding that someone can have a false belief that does not match reality. This reflects understanding that an understanding can be different from actual state of the world.

False belief experiment: Max and his truck, relocated by his mother. Results were consistent across multiple beliefs, countries, etc. Tried this on my kids -- Mira as a 4 year old, no problem. Stella as a 6 year old, no problem either.

Another example -- if you know your competitor will always choose the prize you want the most, you might choose to mislead him/her. General notion: "at 3 years of age, children do not realize that other people can hold a false belief, whereas at around the age of 4, children begin to understand that people's beliefs do not necessarily reflect reality"

Key factor: appearance versus reality - candle shaped like a bird, is it a candle or a bird?

Theory of mind seems to develop coherently and as a system -- once they do well on one ToM task, they tend to do well on many others.

Fantasy play -- telling reality from imagination. Children seem able to tell the difference, but to still feel afraid of things they know are imaginary. Some children even thought that perhaps something they imagined might be able to become real. Area of future research.

Theories of ToM Development

Children seem to develop in spurts -- to go from no theory of mind to strong theory of mind in six months. Pop! Theories about development focus on one of two approaches -- a special mechanism or type of development ("modular"), or an example of more general development.

If modular theory -- a specific neurocognitive system is responsible. Innate structure matures from birth through childhood. But if innate, why can't children pass it before they are 3.5 yrs old? Some arguments are that we just can't measure it well before then, and that even infants show some awareness of ToM.

If general theory -- neuro systems support many abilities, for example overall executive functioning skills (inhibit irrelevant thoughts, work with multiple thoughts at once) might be responsible for ToM tasks. Notion is that children must consciously inhibit interfering memories so as to not be deceived. Seem to correlate ToM with executive control -- but causality, if any, is not clear. May be functional interdependence.

Development of Metamemory

We know that memory monitoring and feeling of knowing is a real thing in humans -- what about in non-humans? And when do children begin to develop what we can clearly measure in adults?

Metacognition in Nonhumans

How about chimps? Commonly thought of as having "mental age of a 3-year-old". Lack of verbalization is a challenge. Study design is key.

Josep Call -- if an animal knows it does not know, it would seek information. So information seeking is used as a metacognitive indicator. Ex: hide a treat in one of two spots. Chimp will look to see which spot the treat is in. Dogs will just go for the treat.

Smith/Shields/Washburn have shown that primates and dolphins have an 'uncertainty' response. Offered an 'opt out' choice when a task is too difficult (no reward, and no punishment either).

Counter: does complex conditioning or innate tendency explain this instead? Hampton studied opt-out/uncertainty in monkeys, and showed that monkeys chose among difficult tasks/high reward and easier/low reward effectively -- they knew when they knew. Can't just be conditioning because his design relied on memory.

Overall conclusion: animals have some metacognition abilities.

Development of memory monitoring in children

Global judgments
Asked to make a a memory judgment, children tend to be overconfident. Practice didn't eliminate their overconfidence either. Children may not be good at monitoring their performance? No, this was ruled out. Wishful thinking? Inability to differentiate what you wish for and what you expect. But this is not proven, because overconfidence often persists even when predicting the performance of others.

Overconfidence may be adaptive -- encourages ambitious trials and learning experiences.

Item by Item Judgments of Learning
Less research on this topic. We believe that adults use inference to make JOLs -- ease of learning, study trials. Children were tested to see if they are sensitive to these cues. Children seemed to respond to the ease of learning and study trials heuristics, just like adults.

How about delayed JOLs? Younger kids given fewer. Children still had better than chance accuracy and higher accuracy on delayed JOLs than for immediate JOLs, and younger children did as well as older children in delayed JOLs.

Conclusion: Children have remarkably adult-like metacognition. Strategic use of study time does improve with age.

FOK in Children
Study -- give definition of words, until they failed to define 35 of them. Afterward, they made an FOK for the words and a multiple choice for each. FOK accuracy improved with age in one study but did not improve in many others.

Strategy Use

Learning a list of words -- most successful if you use a strategy, like a mnemonic. Researchers have investigated if children develop in their use of strategy.

Knowledge about strategies -- do children know about effective ways to promote their learning? Kreutzer et al did a series of interviews to gauge knowledge of strategy, memory, and learning. Children at all ages had some intuitions about these things, although older children articulated better, and tended to offer better strategies.

Effectiveness of Strategy Use

Experiment: list of words, rehearsed. Tendency for early words and most recent words to be best-remembered. Younger children may not spontaneously use the best strategies in these cases. But if instructed to use effective strategies, they are capable of doing so and benefit from them -- if they have a production deficiency. Some children have a utilization deficiency, in which they are trained to use a strategy but don't execute it well.

Borkowski et al: "When a child possesses a number of strategies together with knowledge about their various uses, he or she is able to make an informed judgment about strategy deployment".

Metacognitive model of strategy discovery: application of heuristics.
Associative model of strategy discovery: discoveries through doing tasks, actions, assessing outcomes

Hybrid of metacognitive and associative strategy discovery seems to lead to best results.

Theme: "mutual influence between metacognitive and cognitive processes that is responsible for how we think and behave when faced with many different tasks"

relationship between ToM and Metamemory

ToM and Metamemory do not develop in lockstep. Each is multidimensional and the relationship is complex. ToM investigate knowledge about mental states, metamemory researchers investigate knowledge and processes relevant to task performance. ToM researchers tend to investigate younger children, metamemory researchers focus on 6 and up.

Lockl/Schneider - study at 3, 4, and 5, combining both ToM and Metamemory experiments. Kids' performance correlated throughout the study -- early success and late success. Language is an essential tool -- but even with corrections for language acquisition, the correlations continued. Early theory-of-mind is a precursor of metamemory. Representation seems to be a crucial step.

D&M Ch 9 Concept Review

1 - Why might students not notice inconsistencies between what they know and what they read?
The student might be only absorbing the material, not synthesizing it into an overall understanding or building an internal model of the text.

2 - Self-explanation.
Self-explanation is the process of telling yourself what you know or understand about a topic. It might improve learning by enabling students to more readily see the gaps or inconsistencies in their understanding. Explanation is less passive, and activates different parts of the brain and different kinds of thinking than just reading.

3 - Self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is the belief in one's own ability to do things. Students who believe they can learn are more likely to choose significant goals, helpful strategies, to modify their plans as they go (if it's not working, the problem can be fixed by a new strategy, rather than being caused by some failure on their part) and to carry out their plans more effectively than students who are focused on their own limitations.

4 - Knowledge telling versus knowledge transforming
Knowledge telling is a style of writing that emphasizing delineating everything that a person knows about a topic, regardless of order or significance. Knowledge transforming is a style of writing that connects knowledge together toward an argument, narrative, or model, converting raw facts into a synthesis on the topic. Writing monitoring for a knowledge teller is likely to be oriented around form -- am I writing this correctly, do I have all the facts. Writing monitoring for a knowledge transformer is likely to be oriented around content -- does this make sense, am I making a strong argument here, are there angles I am not considering. Revision for a knowledge teller might look more like copyediting -- revision for a knowledge transformer might look more like a rewrite or structural edit.

5 - Metacognition in math
Math problem solving includes developing a model of a problem, the application of rules, the application of strategies, and developing one's insight into the problem. Student metacognition supports successful math problem-solving by helping them to ask questions about their process and potentially change that process along the way: whether they are developing a useful model, whether they are applying the right rules correctly, whether they've chosen the right strategy, and whether there might be some element of the problem they are missing. Since we know that organizing assumptions are both necessary for a problem to be solved and also a blocking factor to successful solutions, strong metacognition allows students to both prevent an unhelpful organizing assumption from taking hold, and to release a useless assumption in favor of a more useful one.

D&M 9 Discussion Questions

1 - Intro Psych Exam
According to the Winne-Hadwin model, the four main stages for students to study for the exam would be: task definition, goal setting and planning, enactment, adaptation. Inside these stages, the model suggests the acronym 'COPES'.
Task Definition
C - Conditions
The student should learn as much as they can about the exam. When, where, and how long? What materials will it cover? How will the exam be structured? Is there a penalty for guessing? How are items weighted? Is the exam oriented around memorizing facts or understanding concepts? Will it be computational or essay-oriented? Are notes allowed? Do they need to have broad or deep familiarity?
O - Operations
The student should choose sources (both written and human) and ask questions to understand.
P - Products
The end goal of the task definition phase is a full understanding of what the exam will be.
E - Evaluation
Evaluation should include comparing one's understanding to the syllabus and to statements from the professor about what will be included.
S - Standards
At the end of this task, the student should be able to describe their expectations for the exam, in sufficient detail to inform the development of a study plan.
Goal Setting and Planning C - Conditions
The student should think about when and where they should study. How much time will they need? What kind of time do they have available? What locations are optimum, and when are those locations available? Do they need silence? A solid block of time?
O - Operations
The student should think about what methods work best for studying this topic and for preparing for the kind of exam they are expecting. Will it help to rehearse essay answers, create flash cards, read through all of the readings, attend a review session, look through class notes, meet with classmates to discuss, or meet with the professor? Are there problem sets, practice exams, or intermediate assignments which might show weak spots?
P - Products
The end product of this phase should be a study plan. When, where, and how will the content be studied?
E - Evaluation
The plan will be evaluated in two phases -- one, before the exam, the student should review their plan and compare it against their past choices and results. Secondarily, the student should commit to reflecting on their study plan after the exam to improve their understanding of how to plan for exams appropriately.
S - Standards
The overall standard for the study plan should be that it is both reasonable (the student can indeed accomplish it, and it seems fit for purpose) and based on strategy rather than whim or preference -- and after the exam, the additional evaluation criteria is whether or not it was successful.
Enactment
C - Conditions
The student should set up their environment according to their plan.
O - Operations
The student should sit down and actually carry out the study plan in the way they described.
P - Products
The product of enacting this study activity should be an increased understanding of the material.
E - Evaluation
The student should be able to reflect on their studying to determine if they are learning the material.
S - Standards
The primary standard for studying is whether or not the materials are learned to the level described in their understanding of the exam and in their study plan.
Adaptation C - Conditions
If the conditions change, the student should either adapt their plan or change their conditions -- if the normally quiet room is noisy, move to another room or wear headphones, for example.
O - Operations
While studying, the student should continue to monitor their learning and make adjustments. Is their strategy working? Are there topics or issues they did not expect to have difficulty with and yet they have indications that they are not meeting with success?
P - Products
The studying activity should produce increased understanding despite any errors made in the previous phases.
E - Evaluation
Evaluation of adaptation phase should be two-part -- before the exam, the student should determine whether they are effectively adapting. After the exam, the student should consider whether their expectations for the exam were correct, whether their study plan was the right one, and whether they successfully executed on their plan.
S - Standards
The primary standard for the success of adaptation in a study activity is whether they responded appropriately to the feedback they received from their own mind during the process. A secondary standard is to consider this same question after the fact.

According to the model, students might believe they are ready when they're not due if they fail to successfully evaluate their work in each phase (the 'E' in COPES).

2A - Metacognition in Note Taking
Note taking is a writing process that accompanies reading, and serves three functions -- it promotes and supports understanding by helping the reader to be reflective, synthesize materials, and remember them; it allows self-evaluation after a reading assignment by allowing students to ask whether what they have written makes sense and reveals understanding of a text; it supports later work to study or review a topic, since the notes can be reviewed directly rather than the text re-read.
Metacognition might be revealed by studying whether effective note-takers use computers or hand-write, whether they tend to quote, synthesize, or extract key points, whether they use mind maps, diagrams, or paragraph forms. When students don't understand a topic, how do their notes differ? Do they change their note-taking strategy based on in-class experience, exam experience, peer learning, or some other factor? What do students say about their approach to note-taking -- can they describe a strategy that suits the coursework, their own learning styles, etc.?

It may be possible to study note-taking by analyzing the notes the students take, versus their performance on exams -- how much is written, what kinds of things are written, and whether there is a correlation between what is in the notes and what they are successfully tested on (did they write the correct key items down? did they write key items down correctly? did they use their notes later?)

2B - Metacognition in Class Discussions
Participating in class discussions is an opportunity for students to process materials as a group, to test their understanding, to ask questions, and to learn from the thinking of others. Metacognition in class discussions might be revealed by how someone participates (actively, passively, leading, contributing, distracting, synthesizing, arguing) as well as how often (once per class, six times per class), as well as how they respond to the discussion. Do they gain understanding? Change their mind? Persuade others? Or walk out no different than when they entered? This may be tested by doing quizzes before and after a discussion as well as by observing classes and coding behaviors in class. Another angle on class discussion is to assess whether students change their approach over the course of the semester. Do they become progressively prepared and engaged, do they seem to learn from the classroom dynamic and improve the depth of their participation and contributions over time?

D&M Chapter 9

Theme: studies of metacognition and student education

General Models of Student Self-Regulated Learning

Non-metacognitive influences: motivation, goal setting, goal orientation
Metacognitive influences: self-reflection, control of learning

Winne & Hadwin's Model

• emphasizes monitoring-and-control processes; self-regulatory behavior
• Four stages
  • task definition
  • goal setting and planning
  • enactment
  • adaptation
• Inside each stage: COPES
  • Conditions (in which studying occurs)
  • Operations (using strategies)
  • Products (making something)
  • Evaluate (what you produced)
  • Standards (compare to your product)

Studies related to metacognition
Cognitive research -- tends to be laboratory based and focus on minute analysis of underlying mechanisms

Educational research -- tends to be conducted in classrooms using representative materials; investigates relationships between metacognition and student achievement.

Self-Efficacy

Definition: people's beliefs about their ability to successfully complete a given task.

• People who believe they can succeed set higher goals
• select strategies based on effectiveness -- not difficulty or time

Study: Chemers, Hu, Garcia.
Student questionnaire on self-efficacy. Higher self-belief correlates with higher performance (GPA).

Overall findings suggest improving self-efficacy boosts performance by improving self-regulation in learning. People who believe they can achieve will set more specific and more demanding goals, and use more effective strategies.

Quiz
• I know how to schedule my time
• I know how to take notes
• I know how to study to perform well on tests
• I am good at research and writing papers
• I am a very good student
• I usually do well in school and at academic tasks
• I find my university academic work interesting and absorbing
• I am very capable of succeeding at the university

Metacognitive Monitoring

"Monitoring and control are central to effective self-regulated learning and performance."
Overconfidence --> understudying, use of ineffective strategies, underachievement
Calibration of monitoring is related to effective self-regulated learning.
Observation of 'unskilled but unaware' -- tendency for students to be fairly confident, but in some that's unwarranted. Good performers got more accurate over the course of the semester, but poor performers did not recalibrate their judgments. Providing incentives for performance and judgment does seem to improve calibration.

Training accurate judgments --

• rated how well they understood
• described concept they had particular difficulty with
• answered practice questions
• judged their confidence

Results were compared against exams. People with calibration training performed the same on first exam as those who did not receive training. As the class progressed, judgment improved. Improvements in calibration were predictive of higher scores on the final test. More research needed into training methods, understand duration of impact, and transfer

Research - changing answers during a test.
Scores are mostly a result of preparation, intelligence, and motivation. Changing your mind is often beneficial -- trust your confidence on this. If you were guessing, go with the hunch/gut/initial reaction...but if you have a reason, go for it and make the change.

Metacognitive Control

Purpose: to allow people to control their cognitive processing. Ex: after an exam, using results to improve performance on next exam. Increase efforts, decrease efforts, etc.

Study -- Rocky's Boots. Problem-solving program with boolean logic. Question: will training students to monitor their progress and success during practice phases help them to better regulate their problem solving. Structure: some students get no training, one group gets problem-solving training, one group gets problem-solving training and cognitive monitoring prompts. Monitoring group outperformed the other two on difficult problems, and used less time. Thinking about thinking may have encouraged them to use more strategies -- monitoring improves control, which improves performance.

Domain Metacognition

Reading
Literacy is arguably the foundation of education. Major omissions in instructions experiment -- first graders didn't notice, third graders did. Comprehension monitoring -- internally enacting the instructions lets you evaluate whether your understanding allows you to obtain the goal of winning the game.

Comprehension monitoring includes detecting inconsistencies and omissions, evaluating understanding, and comparing to previous knowledge. Control activities might be re-study or using strategies.

Reading Model:

• to create an internal representation of the text, including the words/sentences and the meaning.
• to meet an evaluation standard (understand all, memorize crucial concepts, etc.).
• to use strategies to achieve these goals
  • prepare to read -- set goals, skim, etc.
  • construct meaning from the text -- identify main ideas, make inferences, interpret, monitor
  • reflect on reading -- ask questions, summarize

These phases are recursive and have no fixed order. Each may include monitoring and control activities.

Call this constructively responsive reading.

Ann Brown's work on Metacognition/Education
Gifted/slow was originally thought to be a matter of memory capacity. Brown argued instead that the issue is metacognition (knowing when, where, and how to remember).

One experiment had students read texts and then try to identify which parts were important versus what could be deleted without compromising the main ideas. They asked participants to judge this by first removing the least important ideas, then the next least, and so on. Youngest participants did not distinguish, older students did.

Another experiment had children learn to monitor their comprehension by summarizing, developing questions, predicting what will happen next, and take turns leading a discussion with these activities. Students improved in response to this, and transferred the skills readily.

Strategic skills for reading develop over time (re-reading, summarizing, slowing down, relating portions of texts)

Self-Explanation? Improving your performance by talking to yourself in the "right way". Good students tended to be those who did some "thinking out loud" about a problem, exploring a worked-out example and making inferences, examining trouble spots, etc. Explain your understanding as you proceed for a cognitive boost. Asking students "why do you think that?" is another prompt -- and, even better, ask them "how did I figure this out?" (explain a correct answer). Similar results shown in math, analogy, and science. This approach is thought to promote a more reflective strategy.

Writing

Evaluation and revision is similar to the comprehension & comprehension monitoring in reading. Initial writing models were informed by think-aloud protocols.

Hayes & Flower Model

• Planning
• Translating
• Reviewing

Bereiter & Scardamalia Finding Two differences between novice and expert:

• Novices list everything they know - knowledge telling
• Experts turn knowledge into a complete story - knowledge transforming

Math

Math students spend very little time on the problem, and focus more on the solution, even if it's a dead end -- mathematicians work mostly on the problem itself. Mathematicians also monitored their progress -- asking themselves if they are moving in a useful direction, and changing direction if not. this section was very strange -- geometry students characterized as knowing more about geometry than the mathematicians??? who are these people they did the study on??

De Corte et al recommend that students develop:

• domain knowledge - facts & rules of math
• general strategies for problem solving
• knowledge about one's own cognitive functioning
• self-regulatory skills

Fuchs et al intervention

• Large-scale self-regulation learning program
• Problem solving, monitoring, goal-setting, math self-efficacy, self-monitoring
• Compared to transfer training and no-training control group
• Self-regulation group outperformed others

Achievement is possible via high IQ and/or strong metacognition

Concept Questions, D&M Ch 8

1 - DNA has shown that even witnesses with strong confidence and victims of trauma can be completely wrong about a perpetrator.

2 - Hindsight bias is also called 'knew it all along' -- the idea being that sometimes people say that they were certain of something before they knew the outcome. But evidence shows us that their votes are changed and their certainty is substantially increased by knowing the result. It's explained by a combination of factors -- a need to be right, a confusion of the past with the present, or simply an inability to actually put information aside when making recollections about the past.

3 - Lie detection is typically not very accurate. I think it is probably more difficult when you do not know the subject well, or do not have any way to verify conflicting information. Most of the behaviors that indicate lying tend to be undetected by the human eye. Most of the so-called indicators of lying tend to be characteristics of multiple situations, including stress. There are a few heuristics that might be used, but these can be defeated. Generally people cannot detect lying.

4 - We know that jurors are influenced by eyewitness testimony, especially when the witness is confident, because we have verified through experiments that this factor swings votes substantially.