Reading and Metacognition

Flavell's Model of Cognitive Monitoring (1979)

Cognitive monitoring occurs through the interactions among four components:

  • Metacognitive knowledge - a person's stored world knowledge about people; their cognitive tasks, goals and strategies for achieving them; actions; and experiences.
  • Metacognitive experiences - a person's awareness of his or her cognitive or affective processes; and whether progress is being made toward the goal of a current process.
    • Metacognitive experiences can ...
      • add to, delete from, or revise a person's metacognitive knowledge.
      • cause a person to abandon goals and establish news ones
      • lead to the activation of cognitive and metacognitive strategies
  • Goals
  • Strategies

Nelson and Narens (1990)

Mental processes are split into two or more specifically interrelated levels

  • A COGNITIVE level
  • A METACOGNITIVE level that contains a dynamic model of the cognitive level

There are two dominance relations:

  • MONITORING - The metacognitive level is INFORMED by the cognitive level
  • CONTROL - The metacognitive level MODIFIES the cognitive level

Hacker (2004)

Interplay between two mechanisms:

  • MONITORING - information regarding the status of knowledge or strategies at a cognitive level is provided to a corresponding metacognitive level (Monitoring strategies include rereading a difficult passage, looking back to prior text, predicting upcoming information, comparing two or more propositions)
  • CONTROL - understanding at a metacognitive level is used to influence thought at a corresponding cognitive level (Control strategies include summarizing text information, clarifying text information by using reference sources external to the text, correcting incomplete or inaccurate text information)

Overcoming constraints on self-regulated comprehension through DIALOGUE:

  • Metacognition represents a CLOSED SYSTEM in which only SUBJECTIVE STANDARDS are applied
  • Readers should be encouraged to use not only subjective standards but OBJECTIVE STANDARDS as well. This can be done through
    • Through consulting SECONDARY SOURCES in which interpretations of the primary source are provided
    • Through DIALOGUE with other readers, which encourages
      • active construction of knowledge though culturally meaningful activities
      • generation of questions to guide comprehension
      • reflection on the progress of learning throughout the learning event (Daiute and Dalton, 1993)
      • internalization of dialogue into one's cognitive system, which can provide additional bases on which to direct future self-regulated comprehension (cf Vygotsky, 1978)

References

Daiute and Dalton, 1993. Collaboration between children learning to write: Can novices be masters?

Flavell, 1979. Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry.

Hacker, 2004. Self-regulated comprehension during normal reading.

Nelson and Narens, 1990. Metamemory: A theoretical framework and new findings.

Vygotsky, 1978. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.