Critical Thinking and Metacognition

This is a tabletop that I am beginning to mosaic. I love to put pieces together in a coherent whole. During our f2f classes this past week the issue of blogging came up again and I’ve been pondering the relative ease with which I can do if for my coursework here at Marlboro. Mind you, I have no intention of ever putting myself “out there” for purposes of letting anyone know what I think about life or politics, but for making connections in an educational context, it makes perfect sense to me. At this moment it’s hard not to be grateful for the degree that I got at Vermont College of Union Institute and University, which I didn’t totally understand at the time. All I remember thinking was Wow, what a cool school to let me make up my own plan of study each semester…while deep inside I wondered where the lectures, texts and required courses were. I had to do so much writing, I was sick of hearing myself think. I came away with deep understandings and connections between geology, astro physics and creation/destruction mythology. I studied our frantic culture along with biological and seasonal time and quantum physics. The founding of our country was interwoven with study of the unheard voices who built it and a deeper understanding of class issues. Now I understand that I didn’t have ADD and those professors weren’t just letting me do my own thing. Can I take this opportunity to once again thank Dick Hathaway, Martha Vanderwolk, Howard Shapiro, Anastasia Kamanos-Gamelin and Frank Trocco? At VC this learning process was called critical thinking and here at Marlboro it is called metacognition. I see them now as a bit of the same thing. Metacognition is critical thinking all grown up.

I read an excellent article in Art Education (Jan 07) called Contemporary Approaches to Critical Thinking on the World Wide Web by Melanie Buffington of the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. I thought it fit in perfectly with what I was thinking about this week in Ped II and Web II and it had the extra added bonus of having been found in an Art Ed Journal! This notion of critical thinking is the crux of how we will all create, co-create, re-create and evaluate content on the web. In Buffington’s article she gives a history of the development of critical thinking in education and how that relates to theories and methodology. Phase I is the John Dewey era from 1910-1939 when critical thinking was in fact reflective thinking, research and the scientific method. Phase II critical thinking (1940-1961) had to do with learning to judge the accuracy of information based on the consideration of evidence, as in the work of Edward Glaser, David Russell and B. Othanel Smith who built on Dewey’s work. The theorists from 1962-1979 (Robert Ennis, Karl Buchman, R. Allen, Robert Rott, and Edward D’Angelo) were proponents of critical thinking as evaluation. They saw critical thinking as separate from scientific method, asking students to assess statement's veracity. The Phase 4 group from 1980-1992 (Robert Ennis, John McPeck, Harvey Siegel, Richard Paul) believe that critical thinking needs to include problem solving and evaluation of value statements. Unlike earlier authors, Paul highlighted the metacognitive aspects of critical thinking. In a recent work, Richard Paul and Linda Elder (2004) wrote, “critical and creative thought are intimately related. Each without the other is of limited use. Creativity without criticality is mere novelty. Criticality without creativity is bare negativity” (19).

Looking up the term metacognition, it first seems to appear in the work of J.H. Flavell in an article in American Psychologist called Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry in 1979, right as we entered phase 4. Metacognition is not just thinking about thinking as I have often heard before. I like the definition from the Encarta online: knowledge of your own thoughts. In the metacognitive process the student actually begins to steer themselves through the cognitive process by planning, observing and assessing the learning that is going on for them. The notion is antithetical to what I had learned growing up about education, but I couldn’t help but look at the development of critical thinking and the development of the human being at the same time. In the early years of elementary education, the research and inquiry of Dewey make sense to me. As a student goes through the middle and high school years the judging accuracy and evaluating the truth thinking of Phase 2 & 3 critical thinking is valuable. So although some metacognition obviously happens before a student enters post-secondary education, it seems to me that the other phases lay down a foundation for metacognitive processes to take hold as a human matures.