I think of several ways to solve a problem and then choose the best one.

– Item 7, Junior Metacognitive Awareness Inventory

Metacognition skills may be critical for learners to implement a growth mindset when stressed and to manage emotions when failure makes them want to quit.

– Making the Abstract Explicit: The Role of Metacognition in Teaching and Learning

A barrier to learning is strong negative emotion when faced with some challenge. With the strong negative emotion comes an affront to the sense of self. This might lead some to abandon the path they were on and choose a more assuring course of activity. Some might rely on some notion of fate to explain the failure.

This is not a scientific approach. Science helps us to gain control of events which otherwise seem very puzzling or ego-bruising. While it is trite or cliché that those who persist have a higher chance of success, what one does when persisting makes a difference between success and failure. Someone wise once said, Success comes from prior steps. In other words, it is for lack of trying that success is often elusive.

This too is not very helpful. What exactly does the scientific approach counsel when faced with a frustrating outcome after struggle and toil? First, it is to accept that there are very few problems which are unique to any individual. Someone somewhere and more often than not, many people in many places have encountered the very same issues. The scientific approach then is to use Google as the first port of call.

Now, when one researches an issue, the first thing which will become apparent is that they are not alone. This will somewhat relieve the bruising. This realisation could also of course act to exacerbate the negative emotion. If the problem is serious enough or common enough, there would already be several lines of research on the matter. Entire sets of lexis would be invented after painstakingly dissecting a phenomenon and after thousands of case studies.

Some people have advised caution on relying on the internet for answers; always better to ask a professional they’d say. The professionals themselves unless they invented the field, studied their craft from somewhere. If those materials are available online and they often are, there is nothing stopping someone so determined to bring themselves up to speed. This of course, does not apply to every field and does not mean everyone can now become an expert on everything. What it does mean is that, rather than asking a barber if a haircut is needed, it is better to look at the mirror ourselves. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it will be more useful to learn how to use Google to exercise some degree of independent judgement.

We live in the age of the produser – someone who publishes in their own right and reads what others publish. Many people across fields have attempted to produce bite-sized or watered down or simply written explanations to more technical issues. If one were so inclined, they could use these as a gateway to further, deeper exploration.

Now, the next step could be very forbidding. What someone researching might find is an entire body of research with very specific steps which need to be undertaken to achieve some goal. This might be overwhelming and again this is where the path might be abandoned because it is too much work to improve.

How does one undertake an independent journey to improve in some aspect without getting discouraged? Independent does not mean alone. It includes knowing if help is necessary, what kind and to what extent help is necessary and where to get this help. The answer is metacognition.

Metacognition is basically understanding where one needs to get, where one is and if whether one should remain on course or change course to reach the destination. It is being able to manage difficult emotions and achieving clarity in hazy situations.

Education experts all over the world are now working on boosting the metacognitive capabilities of students. They are of the view that metacognition needs to be explicitly taught; more on this later.

In line with these efforts, Inflexion, a non-profit education consultancy in Oregon, has recently published a report on metacognition explaining its importance and ways to teach it to students. It includes mini case studies of “Several national governments and international organizations” which “are moving toward, or have already prioritized, the attainment of higher order thinking skills as a key educational outcome for students”.

One of these case studies is that of Singapore. The other systems studied are that of New Zealand, Northern Ireland and Israel. The authors express the view that teaching metacognition faces the following challenges.

Metacognition means students take ownership and control. It means they are no longer passive recipients. It means a shift of focus from the what to the why. Why is a loaded question especially in Asian contexts. According to Tan, an eminent, local education scholar, critical thinking which is closely related to metacognition, has come to be associated with an adversarial approach and in Asia we generally don’t lock horns. Thankfully there is in fact no need to. There is according to Tan an Asian way, a more harmonious way of asking questions to deepen one’s understanding. Unfortunately, there is still another barrier peculiar to Asia which she says is that students here tend to see teachers as providers of answers rather than moulders of minds.

Other issues are how educators in general, are “forced” into “the difficult position of balancing the pursuit of higher-order thinking skills while also addressing accountability metrics” because of the way the “national assessment system” is designed (Gallagher et al., 2014 as cited in Beach et al., 2020) and how some places lack the training or resources to teach metacognition.

According to the authors, Israel has begun to “move away from content knowledge attainment to focus on how students learn by integrating thinking strategies into curricula, encouraging inquiry-based learning, and fostering the development of metacognitive knowledge”. Northern Ireland, views metacognition and thinking skills as “a means to achieve subject-specific outcomes” and the authors contrast this with New Zealand’s approach which views thinking as “key standalone outcomes”.

They are of the view that families are important in helping students increase their metacognitive abilities. The following are some ways they can do so.

They can ask students questions which mirror independent self-talk. For example, when the child faces a learning difficulty, they can ask, what have you tried; why do you think you are facing this problem and what else can you try?

They can also “shift the responsibility of learning” to students. This could mean allowing students to come up with their own schedules and plans to achieve learning goals.

It is important to be “responsive to the emotional reactions during the learning process” and this means asking the child to describe what they are feeling and why they think they are feeling that way. If there is some wrong belief, such as, “I’m no good at this”, they can reframe that with, “Not yet” – this focuses on the process and not the outcome or they can decouple the performance from the student’s sense of identity. One way of doing this is to reinforce that consistent effort on the right strategies can make a world of difference.

A lot of metacognition is bound up in independent self-talk during the journey. Students need to know how to take charge of their own learning by asking the right questions to themselves. This will help them find the best path to get to their destination.

There exists however, no path to a mirage.

The Brain Dojo