Metacognition, Week 2Discussion questions, Brown & Smiley 1978

Discussion questions1. If one considers these three chapters as "snapshots"

of the field of metacognition, how has the terrain changed over the last 3 decades?

2. In what ways can you map his claims about learning to solve problems in math onto phenomena (learning or other) in your area of interest?

3. What happens when you apply Paris's functional perspective on motivation to Schoenfeld's description of teaching his students to be metacognitive in math problem-solving? (Does it add explanatory power? does it miss important aspects?)

4. What jumped out at you when reading these chapters?

Brown & Smiley, 1978in Child Development

Three descriptive studies of study strategy use by readers of various ages

Earlier lab-task studies found that even young children selectively attend to most important aspects of stimuli BUT

Younger children not as good at separating important from unimportant

These studies extend this idea to a more realistic and educationally relevant task: studying to remember text

Method Materials (all three studies) Two Japanese folk tales, roughly equivalent

in Interestingness Readability (5th grade per Dale-Chall index) Length Number of “idea units”

Idea unit importance pre-assigned (one quarter to each importance level)

Experiment 1 Subjects: 80 college students paid $2 Groups: IntentionalIncidental

Immediate recall

Delayed recall

Procedure First variable manipulated:

Half told the goal was to recall (intentional) Half told they would comment on how useful the

stories would be for moral education (incidental) Listen to story while reading printed version Second variable manipulated:

Half given immediate recall (write as much as you can remember)

Half given 5-minutes to either write an evaluation of the text (incidental) or study (intentional)

Analysis: 3-way ANOVA Independent variables

Incidental vs intentional Immediate vs delay Importance level

Dependent variable #Thought units (T-units) recalled

p. 1079 3-way interaction, p<.005

Study 2 Goal: Replicate study 1, see if students

improve own recall if given extra time to study 40 additional college students Same materials Stories counterbalanced (half got “cat” on day

1, half “dragon”; reversed on day 2)

Procedure (study 2)

Day 1 All told they would recall gist of story Listen to & read story as before 5-min interpolated task (word puzzle) Attempted gist recall Given 5 more minutes to study (given

notepads, highlighters, etc.)

Procedure, cont.Day 2 Listen to & read story as before 5-min interpolated task (word puzzle) Attempted gist recall Manipulation: Half told “it helps some people

to underline or take notes and you may do that if you want to”

Given 5 more minutes to study (given notepads, highlighters, etc.)

Analysis: 3-way ANOVA Independent Variables:

Immediate vs delay (within-subjects) Prompt vs no-prompt Importance level

Dependent variable #Thought units (T-units) recalled

No effects involving story/day or sex, data collapsed (same for all three studies)

Immed/dely

Immediate-delay X Importance p<.001

Study 3: Development 3 age groups

51 young (5th grade) 85 middle (7th & 8th grade) 59 old(11th & 12th grade)

Same materials and procedure, except Pre-training on procedure with 2 other fairy tales Heard story twice No retention interval with interpolated task

Spontaneous vs prompted Inspected texts for signs of note-taking and

underlining, compared prompted vs spontaneous use. Spontaneous underlining in all three age groups Spontaneous note-taking in two older groups

How much underlining, of which units?

How much did it help?

Brown & Smiley’s interpretation As children mature they can increasingly

predict What are the essential organizing features and

crucial elements of text Make increasingly good use of study time.

From 7th grade on, selectively allocated study to important information

Oldest kids more sensitive to levels of importance

Brown & Smiley’s interpretation, cont Telling kids to use strategies

Increased strategy use BUT had no effect on recall

Methodological implications of the above Combining data from spontaneous and non-

spontaneous strategy users may have washed out effects of strategy use in other studies

Brown & Smiley’s interpretationTheoretical implications Previous work on isolated lab tasks asking kids to

predict their recall (e.g., of lists of words) is problematic developmentally Less aware Less able to recall or predict metacognitive stuff

Argues for tasks where strategy use, metacognition, and study effectiveness studied together Avoids self-reports Reflects real connections among aspects of metacognition

& text knowledge