Metacognition

What is your knowledge about your memory processes? Do you think about your thinking? Do you control your cognitive preocesses?

Metacognition is the "contemplative" process about your thinking.

Remember Alan Baddeley's working memory model?

Yes, that one with the Visuospatial Sketch Pad, Phonological Loop, Episodic Buffer, and the most important (form the point of view of metacognition) Central Executive. That CEO of your working memory uses the exact same processes as they are used in the metacognitive processes. Decision on planning and controlling our thinking.

Metamemory on the other hand is our knowledge and control of memory.

If we study a list of items that we have to remember we will be pretty accurate about how much and which items we will remember. Another things will be if we have to predict how much we will remember. Our estimates will be higher than our later performance, and that is called overconfidence. Remember Pollyana effect? If we like to remember the old good times and only the positive happenings, well, we also overpredict the abilities for the future. That is why students believe they will get As in their future performance and they are completey surprised to find out that they did not do such a great job as they thought they did :-(

You will find a nice explanation about metacognition on Professor Tom Shuell's web page (he was my teacher :-) at SUNY at Buffalo).

Some good tool for teachers to use in class on the NCREL web.

Tip-of-the-tongue
Of course you know it...is there... on that page on the left, by the middle of the page...

The knowledge may be available in your LTM but it is not accessible, or not at the moment. You know that you know but cannot access in that particular moment. That is why TOT is related to metacognition.

If you think that you understand what metacognition, metamemory, and TOT means then we talk about metacomprehension. if you have any doubt, then it would be good to take a pretest, so you can check yourself by looking in our text and matching it with what you stated in that pretest. Again, remember that deep processing (personal, meaningful, elaborate) will improve your metacomprehension, and in consequence the performance.