Tag Archives: metacognition

The Antidote for an AI snake bite – Metacognition

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I first wrote about metacognition back in 2019 – the skill of thinking about your own thinking. Since then, much has changed, I have learned a bit more but crucially AI has come along and is having a significant impact on much of what we do.

It’s now woven into how we write, make decisions and even remember, and with that comes the danger of AI quietly eroding our ability to develop metacognitive skills. Taking the path of least resistance and delegating the hard work to AI leaves us exposed, and ultimately dependant.

As important as metacognition is for managing our own thinking, it’s indispensable when working with AI. It’s what allows us to evaluate the output rather than simply accept it.

TL;DR – the short audio version

Metacognition
Meta comes from Greek, meaning “beyond” or “about.” Metadata for example is data about data, so “metacognition” is thinking about thinking, you’re not solving the problem, you’re watching yourself solve it. Think of it like this – when a chef makes a sauce, he is cooking. He tastes as he goes, deciding if it needs a little more salt, that pause to check if it’s all going to plan, is the meta part. Metacognition works the same way – you’re not just thinking, you’re pausing to ask questions about what you’re doing e.g. does that make sense, what’s the evidence for this, what should I try next?

“Those who know how to think need no teachers.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Flavell and the fluency illusion – Metacognition was coined by the developmental psychologist John Flavell in the 1970s, he made an important distinction.

  • Cognition – the actual knowledge and skills you’re acquiring (formulas, theories etc)
  • Metacognition – your knowledge about that knowledge, your ability to judge accurately what you understand, what you don’t, and what to do about the gap

“Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes” – John Flavell

Flavell broke it down even further:

  • Metacognitive knowledge – understanding how you learn best.
  • Metacognitive regulation – planning, monitoring, and adjusting your approach as you go.
  • Metacognitive experience – the gut feeling of “I’ve got this” or “I’m lost”, which, crucially, is often wrong.

That last point, the gut feeling being wrong, is where most students come unstuck. Psychologists call it the fluency illusion. Re-reading a chapter, highlighting a paragraph – these feel like learning because the material is familiar and easy to process. But familiarity is not the same as retrieval. You recognise the answer when it’s in front of you but that’s a completely different mental operation to producing it from memory in the exam under pressure. The result is a systematic and predictable overconfidence, students walk out of revision sessions feeling as if they are ready, and walk out of the exam hall feeling like they weren’t.

Why does it matter – Research suggests metacognitive skill is often a better predictor of exam success than IQ, because it’s not about how much a student knows but how well they manage their own learning process. That said, it only helps if it leads to action, noticing confusion is only useful if the student actually changes course rather than just being aware of the problem.

“Metacognition is the ability to, at any moment, step off the stage and sit down in the director’s chair.” – Ujjwal Ganesh, author The Observation Effect

The Antidote to AI
In a previous blog I highlighted the problems with Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI tutor. It struggled because it was built like a virtual Socrates, and needed students to ask good questions to prove its worth. The trouble was that many students simply replied “IDK” (I Don’t Know). Not because they were being difficult, but because if you don’t have the metacognitive skills to think through what you know and what you don’t, you can’t ask useful questions. This is the quiet danger of a world with answers on tap. AI can hand you correct information in seconds, but it cannot give you a sense of what you personally still need to learn. That judgement remains yours.

“Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.”  – Plato

It’s also the skill we need most in order to work with AI properly, to check whether its answers are actually correct, to judge whether they’re useful for what we’re trying to do, and to push our understanding to a higher level. In other words, we need to apply metacognition to AI’s output the same way we apply it to our own thinking, not just to ask “do I understand this?” but “is this actually right, and is it what I needed?” Metacognition does two jobs here. It protects (The antidote) stopping AI from doing our thinking for us. It also helps us get better at using AI by teaching us to question, test, and push back. Same skill, two uses.

Conclusion
Metacognition has always been very important in terms of learning, helping us regulate our own thinking, finding the gap between what we assume we know and what we actually know, which helps us deepen our understanding. That job hasn’t gone away. If anything, it matters even more. But AI makes it doubly important, it’s not just about regulating our own thinking, but our thinking about AI’s thinking.  

Nobody will wake up having forgotten how to think. It’s a slow transfer of judgement, question by question, until the habit of checking simply isn’t there anymore. AI hasn’t changed what metacognition is, It’s just made it a skill we can no longer afford to leave undeveloped, for our own thinking, and now, for everything we borrow from someone, or something, else.

Want to learn more – Metacognition: An Important Skill for Modern Times | Brendan Conway-Smith

When a horse might be a cow – the importance of Schema

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Although there is a difference between learning, “the process of acquiring knowledge” and remembering, “the process of recording, storing and retrieving knowledge”, they are symbiotic, the one having little purpose without the other. Which goes someway to explaining why I have written so much about memory over the years. Here is one such example Never forget – improving memory.

In some of these blogs I have referred to the word schema but have not really explored it in much detail, it’s time to put that right.

It’s easy to think that when the brain transfers information from short to long term memory it just sits there floating in a vacuum, waiting for the day it will be needed. But it doesn’t work like that, the brain cannot simply pluck something from this vast space without having structured the information in the first place, effectively having filed it away correctly.

The packets that organise information and make sense of experience are ‘schemas’, the building blocks of cognition. Daniel Goleman

Schema – how information is stored
Schema can be derived from the word’s Greek origin, which means to shape or plan, but it wasnt until 1923 that the child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget used it in the context of learning.

Nine years later Frederic Bartlett described schema in more detail by saying that people organise concepts into mental constructs, models, or frameworks that help them process and remember information. The implication being that when faced with information that fits an existing schema, it will be remembered but if not, it is easily forgotten.

Schemas contribute to our understanding as to how information is stored in the brain and provide insight as to what we can do to learn more effectively. They are built through experience, for example a child may have been told that a cow is an animal that has four legs, eats grass and lives in a field, they may even have seen one. When they next come across a cow, they will associate what they see with that schema and say “cow”. However, if in the next field they see a horse which also has four legs, eats grass and lives in a field, they may believe that is also a cow. It’s at this point the child’s parents intervene by telling the child “No that’s a horse, can you see its taller and runs faster”, this leaves the child with two choices either, build a new schema or adapt the existing one.

Piaget gave us the answer as to what’s happening here, he called it Assimilation and Accommodation. Assimilation is when you make the new information fit with an existing schema for example, the child can adapt their schema by adding – not all animals that live in a field with four legs and eat grass are cows, some are horses. Alternatively, they create a new schema for horses, being fast, tall animals with four legs, that eat grass and live in a field, this is accommodation.

People who do well in maths are those that make connections and see maths as a connected subject.
Jo Boaler, 2014

Chess players use schemas
There is a general assumption that chess players have good memories, which on the face of it is true. But it’s not necessarily an innate ability, they have been building up information of past games and storing them in schemas for years. This is why an expert chess player is able to beat a novice, not because they are processing each move individually, they suffer from cognitive load like everyone else, they are simply accessing past schemas. (Chase & Simon, 1973 et al).

The reason experts remember more is that what novices see as separate pieces of information, experts see as organised sets of ideas. Donovan & Bransford, 2005

How does this help with learning?
If you aware of how your brain stores information you can change the way you study to work with your brain not against it. Below are a few tips you might want to consider.

  • Pre-Assessment or subject review – It’s a good idea before starting a new subject to test yourself or review the underpinning content. This is not so much about finding out what you know, although this might be helpful, it reminds you of prior knowledge and schemas that can be adapted to fit the new information you will learn.
  • Look for analogies and comparisons – when new information is presented think how this might fit with what you now. For example, if you have already learned about income tax, when you come to capital gains tax ask, what are the differences and similarities. They both fit into the schema of taxation.
  • Put Information Into context – when trying to understand something new, consider the context from which it comes, its possible that although the knowledge is new the context is familiar. For example, if you were learning about people who break the law, it might be a good idea to ask yourself in what context you would do this. This could help fit the new information into an existing schema.
  • Challenge your existing schemas – like many things’ schemas can be good or bad. Here is a riddle, a father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the doctor says ‘I cannot do the surgery because this is my son’. How is this possible?

The answer is of course that the doctor is the son’s mother, but because we have a schema that tells us doctors are male, we get it wrong.

And one last big tip for teachers, inside your head you have created schemas that work, share them with your students, they have probably taken you many years to create making them hugely valuable in terms of knowledge transfer.

For more information here is a really good video that explains Memory Schemas in more detail.

The independent learner – Metacognition

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Metacognition is not a great word but it’s an important one when it comes to learning, especially if you are studying at higher academic levels or on your own. Cognition refers to the range of mental processes that help you acquire knowledge and understanding or more simply, learn. These processes include the storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information. Meta on the other hand means higher than or overarching, put the two together and we are talking about something that sits above learning, connecting it by way of thought. For this reason, it’s often described as thinking about thinking or in this context thinking about how you learn.

Smarter not harder

When you have a lot to learn in terms of subject matter it may feel like a distraction to spend any time learning something other than what you must know, let alone reflecting on it, but this fits under the heading of working smarter not harder, if you can find more effective ways of learning that must be helpful.
As mentioned earlier cognition is about mental processes, storage and retrieval relate to memory, manipulation, to the shifting of attention, changing perception etc. But the meta aspect creates distance, allowing us to become aware of what we are doing, standing back and observing how for example perception has changed, this reflection is a high-level skill that many believe is unique to humans. One final aspect is that we can take control of how we learn, planning tasks, changing strategies, monitoring those that work and evaluating the whole process.

Keeping it simple

Its very easy to overcomplicate metacognition, in some ways its little more than asking a few simple questions, thinking about how you are learning, what works and what doesn’t.  Here are some examples as to how you might do this.

  • Talk to yourself, ask questions at each stage, does this make sense, I have read it several times maybe I should try writing it down.
  • Ask, have I set myself sensible goals?
  • Maybe it’s time to try something different, for example mind mapping, but remember to reflect on how effective it was or perhaps was not.
  • Do I need help from anyone, this could be a fellow student or try YouTube which is a great way to find a different explanation in a different format?

Clearly these skills are helpful for all students but they are especially valuable when studying on your own perhaps on a distance learning programme or engaged in large periods of self-study.

Benefits

There are many reasons for investing some time in this area.

  • Growing self-confidence – by finding out more about how you learn you will discover both your strengths and weaknesses. Confidence isn’t about being good at everything but understanding your limitations.  
  • Improves performance – research has shown that students who actively engage in metacognition do better in exams.
  • Gives control – you are no longer reliant on the way something is taught; you have the ability to teach yourself. Being an autonomous learner is also hugely motivational.
  • The skills are transferable – this knowledge will not only help with your current subjects but all that follow, not to mention what you will need to learn in the workplace.  

It will take some time initially but, in a way, metacognition is part of learning, it’s an essential component and as such you will end up knowing more about yourself at some point, even if you don’t want to, so why not do it sooner rather than later.

And just for fun – Sheldon knows everything about himself – even when he is wrong