Definition of metacognition, part 2

It was said that the concept of metacognition entered the field of cognitive psychology in 1976 with John Flavell. It should be remembered that in 1975, Ann Brown wrote a paper about “Knowing, knowing about knowing, knowing how to know“.

Flavell defined the word metacognition in quite general terms. Many have written new definitions trying to organize what metacognition exactly covers.

Ann Brown (1987, Metacognition, Executive Control, Self-Regulation, and other Mysterious Mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert and R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, Motivation, and Understanding Hillsdale New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 65-116) also distinguished between knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition.

1. Knowledge about cognition.
   • Know what you know: Brown named secondary ignorance the fact of one not being aware of one’s own knowledge. Not knowing what you know is secondary ignorance. My understanding of Brown paper is that the base of metacognition is being aware of self knowledge level or self ignorance level about something. For her this includes
     • metacomprehension, i.e. to know that you understood a question for instance;
     • evaluation about what can be deduced from knowledge;
     • evaluation of degree of certainty about knowledge;
     • prediction of the knowledge level reached, i.e. did I study enough to be able to remember what I’ve studied the day I take the test?
   • To know what is needed as knowledge: to accomplish a task one must identify what knowledge will needed (Brown, A.L., 1980, Metacognitive development and reading. In R.J. Spiro, B. Bruce & W.F. Brewer (Eds), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension (pp.453-479). Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; p. 460).
2. Regulation, or to know the utility of different intervention strategy, or in other words if someone is able to do so it means that this person is aware to change his/her behaviour when he/she mades a self judgment that his/her performance is not optimal.

The part that is most interesting in relation to confidence marking is of course when Brown includes with metacognitive knowledge the notion of self evaluating knowledge using the notion of degree of certainty.

Definition of metacognition, part I

J. H. Flavell (1976) invented the word ”Metacognition”. He describes it in these words: “Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them, e.g., the learning-relevant properties of information or data. For example, I am engaging in metacognition if I notice that I am having more trouble learning A than B; if it strikes me that I should double check C before accepting it as fact.” (p 232 in Metacognitive aspects of problem solving. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), The nature of intelligence (pp.231-236). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).

John Flavell (from Clark University)

By giving a degree a certainty having chosen the correct answer a student is giving a judgement about his knowledge. The student is so refering to his knowledge. He is thinking about the quality of his knowledge. When someone doubt a double check is to be made. What does doubt means? Does it means being less sure than 100% sure? Anyway when a lower than 100% judgment is made Flavell’s words are met: “if it strikes me that I should double check C before accepting it as fact.” It is my opinion that giving one’s confidence about one’s knowledge is a metacognitive activity.Getting deeper into Flavell’s definition metacognition includes:

1. knowledge about cognition
   • person variables, or knowledge about one’s self, and others’ thinking;
   • task variables, or knowledge that different types of tasks exert different types of cognitive demands, and;
   • strategy variables, or knowledge about cognitive and metacognitive strategies for enhancing learning and performance.
2. Regulation of cognition.

Next: Ann Brown’s point of vue

My first time

The first time I met degrees of certainty was in my first year as a veterinary student at Liege university. Back in 1982 professor Lazlo used degrees of certainty testing our knowledge in chemistry. He was using a reckoner by question, meaning that each question will receive a score mixing both correctness (or not) and certitude. The tariff scale ranges from -20 up to +20. For each confidence interval a tariff for correct or incorrect answer was computed, see illustration. This illustration was the one and only information we received about degrees of certainty.

The student answering a question must choose one out of six confidence intervals (form 0% to 25%, form 25% to 50%, form 50% to 70%, and so on). Should the chosen answer be correct then the ”for a correct answer” line of points will be used. Should the answer be incorrect then the ”for an incorrect answer” is used. Note that the last to values will remove points while the three first will reward some points for a wrong answer but with a low confidence.

Why was he using degrees of certainty? What was the point of being obliged to give our confidence with our answers? How to use well degrees of certainty? Not a single information was given. First test I tried to be honest giving my confidence in every answer. My score was terrible. I lost -20 points more than once and the points I earned with the good answers were far to compensate for my mistakes with high confidence. I asked the other students how to improve my result. They were unanimous: ”Always choose 3”. They were not saying ”Use the 70% – 85% interval”. They refer to the value coding for that interval. Why that interval? Because for a good answer you gain is +18 and if the answer turns to be wrong you do not loose points.

Like almost all students I immediately hated confidence marking and degrees of certainty. It will change some 20 years later… but that is for another post.