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How do we move up the Bloom's pyramid? How do we go beyond memorization of facts and formulas?

Metacognition and becoming a self-directed learner

Metacognition is like having your brain looking from the outside at your own brain. It is the ability to think about one's own thinking.

Novice in a field tend to be overconfident on their mastery of the material. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (see figure).

Here are the five important steps of metacognition.

• Assess : You need to assess the task. What is required of you? What is the level of skills that will be needed? Is remembering enough or will you need to apply and analyze?
• Evaluate : Figure out your strengths and weaknesses. What do you already have? What are you missing?
• Plan : Accounting for the current situation and given time constraints, make the best plan to do the task at the level required.
• Apply and Monitor : Apply strategies (see below) and monitor continuously your performance.
• Reflect : Reflect on your performance, restart the cycle, re-assess the talk, evaluate and plan.

Shallow Versus Deep Learning

Let us look at the following cognitive experiment. 24 words are read to a group of people, some of the participants are told to determine (in their heads) if the word contain an E or a G. Others are told to determine (in their heads) if they find the word pleasant or unpleasant. After the 24 words are read, each group has to recall as many words as they can by writing them on a piece of paper. They all paid attention, they all tried hard. But they had different instructions which forced some students to do  shallow processing while other did deep processing of the words.

Shallow processing is when the information is stored only in the working memory. Deep processing is a way to make connection to things in your long-term memory. As you might expect, learning with deep processing make things stick better.

Here are the results of the experiment. The "intentional" versus "incidental" (blue vs red)  refers to the fact that some students were told they would need to recall the words while others were not warned. Surprisingly, being aware that you would be tested had little impact on the performance. The only thing that mattered was whether the learning involved shallow or deep processing.

What you are thinking when studying affects how much you learn. You internalize the information and achieve deeper processing by connecting the material to your emotions or to previous experiences.

How to Achieve Deep Processing.

Just perusing the book with music on or doing problems quickly or googling is shallow processing and mostly a waste of your time. It is better to spend less time but actually use that time to really process the information.

As you study, you can achieve deeper processing by asking yourself questions such as

• Elaboration : How does this concept relate to other concepts?
• Distinctiveness : How is this concept different from other concepts.
• Personal : How can I relate this to my personal experience? 
• Appropriate to retrieval and application : Ask yourself what you are expected to be able to do with the information.