I am not a big fan of this term (meta-cognition) in that it is nowhere as exact a term as it should be. Meta-cognition mean to think about thinking, but to me this starts to imply some sort of recursive ‘hall of mirrors’ sort of navel gazing which would be antithetical to what it really means. Meta-cognition relates to forms of introspective problem solving methods, specifically about study and learning methods.
I first became aware of the real power of meta-cognition when I worked in the electronics field. I was in a position where I worked with quite a few math, physics, and engineering PhD’s. Over time I started to see that there were some interestingly similar attributes to these people. It wasn’t what most people would have guessed… They weren’t all that smart (obviously some of them were real whizzes…), but they were all what I would call ‘professional’ students. By this, I mean that they were all very efficient in gathering information and working out problems and conundrums very quickly.
As you might imagine (if you knew me very well…), I was impressed with these abilities. Over time I started to get a better understanding of these skills and ‘tricks’, I started to try to develop similar skill… It really paid off.
Several years later I was back in college (trying to become a social studies teacher…). I used these ‘introspective methods’ on a daily basis. An example of the types of skills I was working on would be: using the self-knowledge that I could memorize information by working on a task in small pieces, I would ‘study’ whatever was part of my assignment for only 10 minutes at a time (these study bouts were timed for every 30 minutes…). I found I could very easily memorize large amounts of information.
Another example (and a much more prosaic one at that…), would be that I started to take notes in every class I was in, and then to take some meta-notes when I started studying what the previous class covered. This means that I would document what I covered in the class, and then (immediately, if possible) go through and analyze the notes with my then current memory of what I covered in the class (and document THAT!). Obviously, much of this sounds a bit too-involved, but I aced every class, every test…
Taking time to develop the discipline and motivation to do this were the meta-equivalent to what most of my fellow students were doing.
This personal experience with some meta-cognitive methods has helped me in many ways. This also gets me wondering (most of the time) as to why these specific skills, tools, and techniques are never taught in school. As with most of the important knowledge which I have gained in life, these sorts of arcane ‘student’ skills were found by my careful observation of others.
I’ve also wondered if this is how these skills proliferate through academia… Many of these skills could justifiably be considered as having much more value than having an encyclopedic grasp of…let’s say: American History (actually you could fill in almost any topic).
What I guess this signifies is that at some point, all students become autodidacts, and that this is the only way we learn things that well. This also starts to give me an understanding of why these tools are so rarely seen (let alone taught). Most of these skills only need two specific things…motivation and self-discipline.
It doesn’t take much effort to look over the current education scene to see that these are two topics with which we (as part of the education industry) do poorly. I spent some time (last year) teaching in South Korea, and the major difference I saw when comparing teaching in the USA versus South Korea was…motivation and self-discipline..
I have often heard broad criticism of American students (and hence criticism of American education) in that they seem so immature. I suppose that there could be an argument to put forth (from somewhere in this area of ideas and thoughts) that there are many things which we could do to ‘fix’ this problem. But within the scope of this blog posts’ thesis (i.e. this is a hidden, secret knowledge), there is much which hasn’t been taught to undergraduate college students for years in this regard.
Maybe mastering some of these skills does have as a prerequisite some level of maturity, and as a consequence, there is little of value in dealing with these sorts of topics for those under the age of…twenty?
