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0:00 hello and welcome to this screencast on metacognition skills this word metacognition may be new to you if it is think of it informally as learning to learn I developed this screencast because I teach upper-level accounting courses they're quite challenging and so I frequently have students ask me how they can improve their learning in their grades I've had several students adopt these metacognition skills to their benefit they've substantially improved their grades and their learning that piqued my interest watching their performance change and so I've spent the last year and a half two years reading numerous articles books and research studies on metacognition and I thought it made sense to summarize everything
0:47 that I've read and learned in this screencast and in particular focus on metacognition skills that you can implement starting today I think it'll be beneficial to you particularly if you're new to college or in college and essentially learning full-time my name is Steve orpurt and I'm a professor at Arizona State University a lot of people just call me prof. or prof Oh or prophecy hero if you want to find me a quick Google search we'll do it to begin developing your metacognition skills do the following stop this screencast download a copy a PDF copy of the slides they're in the first comment section and preview what's
1:34 to come but preview in a specific way don't just flip through the slides passively looking at the topics instead actively ask and write down by hand several questions that you'd like to see answered during the screencast by doing so it helps you actively learn the material if I don't happen to answer those questions put them in the comment section and I will answer them there let's take a look at a little background information before we get into the specific skills themselves ask yourself this important do you tend to believe that intelligence is fixed that someone is either born smart or not I think it's an important
2:21 question because in my life experience vast number of people believe that it is fixed yet the research results point to a different conclusion they point to the idea that your intelligence can grow and for it to grow a key attribute is the idea of adopting a growth mindset you might think of a growth mindset as a focus on learning the idea is similar to the idea of strengthening a muscle if you wanted to strengthen your arms let's say you wouldn't just go to the gym and loiter around and expect to come out with strong arms now you'd embrace an effortful thoughtful disciplines strengthening
3:07 program and improving your intelligence and your learning is the same idea in other words intelligence is an effortful process not a thing but effort itself isn't enough you need discipline and thoughtful programs ie the metacognition skills to build your intelligence and your learning building on that let's take a little look a little deeper look at this idea of a growth mindset do you know people who tend to exhibit a fixed mindset or a growth mindset in my
3:52 experience people tend to show one or the other rather frequently those that show a fixed mindset tend to want to look smart as a result they avoid effort they avoid obstacles they avoid challenges and minimize or avoid negative criticism that could be useful to them on the other hand people with the growth mindset see effort as a path to mastery when their obstacles they persist when their challenges they embrace them and when they're criticized they learned from that criticism as a result people with a growth mindset tend
4:40 to achieve more people with a fixed mindset tend not to live up to their full potential so a key to growing your intelligence and learning is to move yourself into an idea of a growth mindset there's a lot to learn here and so a quick Google search will turn up numerous articles that will help you and I'd encourage you to do that interestingly research also indicates that those that we view as intelligent may in in large part not totally but in large part have learned to learn better than others and so I think it's important to study these metacognition skills and embrace them at the same time
5:27 research also shows that learning itself is a skill metacognition is the word and many of us this includes me previously hopefully I'm a little better now many of us learn poor learning habits and they limit our development so the takeaway coming out of this research is quite compelling in my view that is improving your metacognition skills will help you learn better and improve your intelligence and at least in my experience it appears to work let's start in on the fur on the metacognition skills the first skill that you want to
6:13 master is to monitor your learning and the best way to do that is with Bloom's taxonomy you can take a look at this chart this illustration here the question you want to ask yourself is you want to ask yourself which level of Bloom's do you typically learn at it probably won't surprise you that many of my students seem to be learning the lower levels of blooms they remember and they understand in other words they study to recall facts and basic concepts and they study to explain ideas and explain concepts but they don't practice learning at the higher levels of blooms and as a result when they take an exam
7:01 they're learning tends to be somewhat superficial and perhaps elusive when they when the exam is placed in front of them what they need to do and what I'd encourage you to do is focus on moving your learning up blooms practice and think about applying the learning that you're doing in other words try to use information in new situations analyze it draw connections amongst ideas and same thing with evaluate and create so the key here as a metacognition skill is to monitor your learning with blooms ask yourself which level do you typically learn at and try and move up blooms how
7:47 do you move up blooms the remaining metacognition skills are the tickets you need to help you all of these skills that I'll talk about from here on out involve active learning so ask yourself do you read or listen to lectures passively how frequently do you read a page and then kind of wake up and wonder what you just read or listen in class only to have no idea what was discussed I didn't know whether to smile or shake my head when I came across a research study pretty simple research study where after a large lecture researchers simply asked students what the lecture topic was as they left class about a third knew so a lot of passive learning going on at least in that class that day point
8:34 being that you want to be much more active with your learning and and so embracing the metacognition skills will help you move in that direction for all of your studies develop the habit of intensely studying with intense study sessions interleave those study sessions what that means is study each course each day and study all the material in each course each day ask yourself when you finish a topic in your courses do you continue to learn it by testing yourself or forget about it until the exam if you're like most of my students if I think about 99% of them
9:20 would say they forget about a topic until right before the exam and then revisit it so a better study approach is intense study sessions where you're continuously going back and studying material that you've previously learned most of the experts say to use intense 30 to 50 minute sessions you should experiment with that one expert said she used 90-minute sessions so experiment and see what works well for you if you need some help or some guidance this Pomodoro Technique is pretty wide widely used and it helps address procrastination which many of us could use some help with if you google it'll pop right up and you can learn how to
10:05 employ this technique it's pretty straightforward and helpful I've found question then is what should you do during your interleaved intense study sessions well you want to employ the metacognition skills that we'll talk about but another way to look at that is you do not want to just read reread and reread either your text or your course handouts a lot of my students do that and you become very familiar with the words or the notes but you're still functioning if you think about it at these lower levels of Bloom's so you want to have intense study sessions and
10:51 then employ the metacognition skills that we'll talk about one of the first skills that you can implement is to preview material for quite with questions ask yourself do you tend to just show up at a class or just start reading textbook material with little preparation if so give up that habit instead what you want to start doing is actively preview the day's course material by asking questions and the questions you want to ask should be why how and what if questions because those questions will help you move up Bloom's to the higher levels skim both your textbook and your lecture notes before class it's a widely
11:38 held misconception I think that most students think they learn everything in class I don't know an instructor who thinks that's true never met one often times their example problems or assigned problems and you should try to look at them beforehand to solve them you may not be able to because you are just exposing yourself to the new new information and new knowledge but if you can't solve them use them to generate questions and then if you're doing this previewing for questions the obvious next step is to listen in class or read your textbook for answers to these questions it's much more active learning do so with intense study sessions write
12:26 all your notes and questions by hand write your preview questions by hand take lecture notes by hand writing helps you by hand helps you assimilate information which helps you to move up Bloom's research shows in contrast that students who use their computers for note-taking tend to mindlessly type everything they hear or see without thinking about it so it's very inactive and they end up passively gaining some knowledge but not getting much out of the time that they've put in so write your notes by hand let's practice that so here's a passage it's from an intermediate accounting textbook that I
13:13 use in one of my upper-level classes you may not know a thing about accounting our thing about core or amortization and that's okay that's not the point we want to ask ourselves some preview questions about this passage couple paragraphs here first and foremost most of my students wouldn't bother to preview before they started reading this or before I started talking about this in class but those that did the few that did would probably highlight corredor amortization they might highlight corridor approach and they might highlight this sentence because it's bolded and so again that's very passive what you want to do to preview is you want to ask yourself some
13:58 why how and what if questions so what would be an example of some questions you might ask well basic easy preview question be why use corridor amortization how does corridor amortization work if you previewed and happened to read this bolded sentence at the bottom says above that size the accumulated OCI account related to gains and losses is too large and must be amortized you might ask what if the accumulated balance becomes too large and then again that sentence may not have any meaning to you but it would to an accounting major after they studied this topic the point being don't
14:46 highlight preview preview by asking questions and writing them down how why and what if questions are best because they help you move up blooms your learning will be much more active and then you go to class or read the rest of the textbook and the surrounding material looking for answers to those questions read and listen cumulatively so develop this habit it's very easy the idea is to read a sentence or at your choice maybe you read a paragraph or a section of a book depending on the complexity and ask yourself how does this sentence or perhaps paragraph or section relate to the prior sentence paragraph or section the idea then is
15:34 your building as you read by actively in your mind relating the new sentence of the new paragraph to what you've already read when I suggest this to students initially they're gonna go well they always do Prof that's a lot of work it'll take forever and when they try it they report to a person that it saves them time it saves them time because they're much more actively reading and they remember what they're reading and it generates questions so they're they're functioning at a higher level faster while you're reading cumulatively you're also asking your why how and what if questions so you move up Bloom's you may be answering
16:19 hopefully are answering your preview questions and your handwriting everything you should practice this with something important to you you can use this corridor amortization passage that's in the prior slide but probably better if you pick something off your desk say a page in length and just try cumulatively reading it and see how it works for you the first time you try it you might be surprised at how well you remember that material and you find you don't need to read it again you can move on to using that information applying it or evaluating it or analyzing it the higher level Bloom's learning skills but stop and give that a try for a few minutes if you're previewing for
17:06 questions and reading cumulatively you're probably already starting to minimize your highlighting but if not do so it's very passive learning and so instead of highlighting which a lot of my students do preview for questions use your intense study sessions what do you do after your you read a passage or after class at the end of your intense study session or at the end of class use the 30 second rule take out a sheet of paper take out a pen and pencil and in 30 seconds write down the important concepts and the important ideas from that class or from the section of the textbook you just read you'll find it helps you to remember
17:54 everything and brings forth questions that you need to seek answers to to fill in gaps in your knowledge at some point shortly thereafter attending class you want to read your notes but you want to read your notes actively not just to memorize them read them to fill in gaps and do so by hand write out your new questions ok so you're reading your notes but notice that you're not just reviewing to remember which again is one of the lower levels of learning on blooms you're actively moving up blooms by filling in gaps and writing out new questions in your intense study sessions
18:41 chunk information and place it in context by concept here's the idea draw a few boxes here and the idea is to write down in your notes what you consider the concept that you're studying and then what are the chunks of knowledge that support that concept so you're organizing the material actively as you study so let's take a look at that a little bit closer I'm gonna go back to this corridor amortization
19:28 passage we don't have time to read the whole thing nor the interest probably let's just take this first sentence and see how it might work so the concept you might say is corridor amortization you don't know a thing about it but that's okay and the first sentence says the asset gains and losses and the liability gains and losses can offset each other so you might initially organize that information as the concept would be corridor amortization and one chunk might be asset gain or loss netted or offset and liability gain
20:20 or loss netted and then these two things net so you might draw in another chunk in here to net assets and liabilities however you want to organize it the key then is recognized as you understand material better and learn more you're becoming more of an expert at it and experts have created large chunks around concepts in their mind so if you think about me if you came up and asked me about say pension accounting you might find out to your chagrin that I could talk for several hours or more about
21:06 pension accounting I can talk about the history I could talk about the future where they're thinking of changing it different problems where students succeed fail all this stuff comes into my head but that's a result of years of chunking so you're you're forewarned don't ask me about pension accounting but for me I might have a concept here and I might just say the concept for me is pension accounting and then one chunk is corridor amortization so my chunking would be different because I have more experience so as you
21:54 study with your intense study sessions start off organizing the material as seems reasonable and then recognize as you learn more you want to reorganize it into larger concepts and larger chunks as you become familiar and work with it okay you may I may be an expert I hope in in accounting financial accounting but clearly not everything if you asked me about my Spanish language skills it's a skill I'm starting to develop I'd like to learn Spanish you'd find out right away I have very few small chunks much fewer and smaller than I would like so as I learn Spanish as a novice I'm starting with a lot of small concepts
22:41 and small chunks and then over time hoping to reorganize that that knowledge in my head into larger chunks and larger concepts okay metacognition skill context and chunking you're doing that in intense study sessions also in your intense study sessions paraphrase develop this habit teach or explain these topics to others or to your stuffed animals it helps with your organization your retrieval your chunking and identifying concepts I encourage students to work in groups because it facilitates paraphrasing they explain problems and concepts to one another and it's no surprise that the
23:27 groups that I have that work well together oftentimes will all come to an office hour together and take turns asking questions and build off of each other's questions they're paraphrasing and they tend to perform better on the exam as a result even if one group member comes and the others don't the one group member tends to talk for the group as a whole and say so-and-so thought this I thought that that uh and and so there there's a lot of paraphrasing going on with students my students who work in groups so I'd strongly encourage you to work within a group if at all possible okay tie everything that you'd learn to what you already know it actively relate new
24:14 material to what you already know it facilitates your context in your chunking your remembering is and so that passage that I showed you is called corridor amortization the accounting students that would show up in my class should know what amortization is but they're unfamiliar with corridor amortization so they should tie this new concept corridor amortization to a familiar concept for them amortization and they'd find that there's a lot of overlap in how it works but not everything there's some new new concepts there too throughout all of your studies always test yourself you learn more by testing
24:59 yourself it helps you assimilate information it helps you retrieve information and it identifies gaps in your knowledge of course to test yourself you have to have questions so presumably you've been previewing for questions so you've developed a number of you're on your own but also with textbooks you have problems at the end of a chapter some assign some not you can do them all and then many textbooks have an online support website that has a numerous problems professors provide practice exams use them all to test yourself initially when I suggest this to students rather than read and reread and re reread the textbook instead test yourself they're not that committed to
25:46 this strategy if you're not or you you're thinking I'll try but then go read this little article how tests make us smarter in the New York Times New York Times allows you to download a small number of articles for free so you should be able to download it and I think that will convince you that this metacognition skill is a ticket to better learning and better grades if that's important to you continuing this idea of always testing yourself solve your textbook and your practice exam problems without you looking at the solutions if you ask students at this point
26:31 our mistakes at this point either good or bad both students will say mistakes are good at that point because you identify gaps in your knowledge any misunderstandings are identified before taking the exam and of course then there's time to address them but carry this idea even a step further when you finish a problem only check the bottom line answer if if your answer is wrong focus on finding your mistake without using the solution it will help you identify gaps in your knowledge if your answer is correct compare your approach to the solution approach and evaluate any differences so always test yourself a number of people use the notion of a
27:20 memory palace if you've not heard of this it's a kind of intriguing idea give it a try sometime the idea is to take a geographic space so that might be your favorite street that you know well and then if you have a series of items that you need to remember that you're just learning mentally place these items throughout the street and then to remember these items just mentally walk down your street initially students are a little skeptical of that but this is the method that the memory experts the world wide memory experts used to memorize who knows five decks of cards or hundreds of numbers or whatever they do anyway this this method has a long
28:06 history if you're interested in it there's a Wikipedia article that's that's pretty intriguing and you might actually use this method to help you learn and remember and and employ the metacognition skills that were talking about right now use exam wrappers the idea is the following most of my students will just look at their exam scores and they're either happier they're not instead evaluate your performance with the goal to improve your future learning so ask yourself approximately how much time did I spend on the material tested the exam was it an appropriate amount of time okay given the complexity and the breadth of the breadth of the exam what
28:54 percentage of my time was spent on best practices previewing solving homework problems without reviewing solutions first etc so evaluate your performance with an idea of improving it next time it might be good to take a look at an example and this is a pretty intriguing one this is from a pro psychology professor at USC he was teaching introductory psychology and he had a student who earned exceptionally high exam scores and he was curious so he asked that student how he studied and the student responded so take a look at what this student did relative to the metacognition skills that we've talked about and perhaps relative to how you you learn he said he always does the
29:43 reading prior to a lecture so probably got most of my students and me when I was in college right there he anticipates test questions and their answers as he reads see how active his learning is he answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures to test his retention of the reading review study guides takes the practice tests to discover which concepts he doesn't know and makes a point to learn them notice this one reorganizes the course information into a study guide of his own design this student was chunking spaces out his review and practice over
30:30 the duration of the course and a couple other things there that you can read point being that this student scored very high he had excellent developed excellent metacognition skills and praying they were paying huge dividends for him do you want more motivation I think motivations misunderstood Soto a number of other people and so you might take 22 minutes go to this YouTube address and listen to an interview of Mel Robbins talk about motivation and see if it changes your view and helps you to be a little more motivated if that's something you need as you listen to this YouTube video focus on the process of learning and
31:18 building the process of learning not necessarily or not just the outcome the idea is to build good processes those are the metacognition skills that you should implement and so they're they're easy to keep track of and they're doable there's plenty of room to grow because the research in this area on metacognition shows that most of us don't employ the metacognition skills for example if you look at this chart on the right of the screen here clearly students think they should assess the tasks assigned in a clinic class but research shows they don't clearly
32:05 students think they should evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and and they do but they overestimate their strengths and in particular the worse their performance the more they overestimate students agree they should plan but they either don't or do it poorly they clearly should apply better learning strategies but they often just don't and they should reflect on their performance may be using exam wrappers but typically they don't so plenty of room for improvement there that's it if you want to develop these skills the best time to start is right now and the best way to start is in approximately 30 seconds write down the important
32:52 concepts of metacognition that you've been exposed to or seen in this screencast if you listen to the mill Robbins video then this will make sense to you five four three two one start now and I would add to that enjoy
