4.7 Thinking about learning by ...

It was rare for participants to make explicit reference to metacognition during their responses, though being able to identify metacognitive elements within responses is not difficult given that they were clearly asked to talk about the 'learning' they saw in the images. Here then are instances where participants exhibit 'knowledge about and regulation of one's cognitive activities in the learning process' (Veenman et al, 2006: 3), rather than my interpretation of their responses. Veenman also distinguishes between metacognitive knowledge, the declarative knowledge of knowing that, and metacognitive skills or the procedural knowledge of knowing how.

Let's first consider a response from M in which she describes how spider diagrams support her learning process:

"Normally when I revise, each subject has a different colour and then each spider diagram has different colours for the links. So that when I'm in an exam I know that history is blue and the links will have been in orange so I can remember where they went and think of it like that."

She exhibits metacognitive knowledge in explaining that this cognitive strategy has assisted the process of reconstructing the information she needs in an examination, but also displays metacognitive skill in recognising that it is the creation of the diagrams which is the crucial factor in this being, for her, a successful approach:

"Creating it is quite a big part of it because as I'm doing it I'm thinking, right fine, I need an orange arrow from that one to that one. It helps me personally see the links between topics or pieces of information, so I can then ... when it's finished, it helps me learn the information that's on it. That's just me, but there are some people who hate them."

Her closing remark, like the majority of respondents, acknowledges that different individuals have different needs, adopt different strategies or exhibit different behaviours. T fleshes this out somewhat:

"Different people learn in different ways. People have different capacities for learning and some people learn academically and others from skills."

offering an explanation of the difference between learning how and learning that:

"There is a distinction because a skill can be used in different ways, but information is pretty specific. I think that most skills, once you learn it, you learn it for life, whereas you can forget information."

Whereas O sees a developmental link between these two:

"I think knowledge is involved in skills because if you don't have any knowledge, you'd find it hard to get new skills."

It was more common for respondents to exhibit metacognitive knowledge, allowing us a glimpse of the three variables that Flavell (1979) considers make up that knowledge: person, task and strategy. In describing a way in which a friend explained a concept to her, R touches on all three:

"I think this is probably most valuable because I find that when somebody explains something to me, I learn it better. There are things I distinctly remember because I remembered how someone explained it to me."

As with the constructivist environment I describes within a group discussion:

"If you're talking about a project or something, as I think they are, you sort of get some ideas from one person and some from another so it builds it up; more than just one person on their own."

Just occasionally however, a response might suggest that a particular strategy being employed was scrutinised for its efficacy as R did here:

"We get writing tasks where we have to memorise the writing and then write it out, but if we don't know the stuff that we're writing because we don't understand the vocabulary, then that doesn't work."

which demands a degree of metacognitive skill to make the analysis.

Metacognition may be implicit, rather than explicit in each of the preceding examples, however a 'Learning to Learn' course recently introduced in school is beginning to provide respondents with rudimentary vocabulary to enable their understanding become more overt:

"It's an experiment. I like doing experiments; it helps me learn. Because it's practical and then you've done it yourself. You remember it better instead of just writing it down. Kinaesthetic learning!"

Though some are further in their understanding than others: