The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 232
Jennifer Gonzalez, host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 232 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how metacognition can optimize learning.
Here’s a scenario you might be familiar with: A person — maybe you, maybe someone you know — studies for hours to prepare for a test. Hours. Days, even. And then when test day comes they completely blow it. “I don’t understand,” they say. “I studied so hard. I thought I knew that stuff.”
The act of thinking about our own thinking, of knowing what we know and don’t know, is referred to in academic circles as metacognition, and it plays a huge role in how well our brain holds on to information. If we can get a better understanding of how metacognition works, we can tap into it to improve our learning and teach our students to do the same.
To help us do that is my guest, Megan Sumeracki, a professor of cognitive psychology at Rhode Island College. Megan’s area of expertise is in human learning and memory, and applying the science of learning in educational contexts. In 2023, she co-wrote a book called Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better (Amazon | Bookshop.org), which offers evidence-based learning strategies students can use to study more effectively. On today’s episode, Megan and I talk about what metacognition is, what it looks like when our metacognitive monitors are wonky, and how learners can leverage it to optimize learning — and stop putting in the wrong kinds of effort when studying.
One important note: In our conversation, Megan refers to a concept called retrieval practice. She explains what it means, but if this is a new term for you, now is a great time to learn what it is. We’ve covered this term a LOT in this podcast, so I recommend you go over to Cult of Pedagogy, click the word “blog” in the menu, scroll down to where it says “Browse by Topic,” and click the phrase “retrieval practice.” That will take you to all seven articles and podcast episodes we’ve done that have anything to do with this topic. The best one to start with is called Retrieval Practice: The most powerful learning strategy you’re not using.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank The Wired Classroom for sponsoring this episode. Curious about tech integration but unsure where to start? The Wired Classroom — a free, monthly newsletter brought to you by Edutopia — is your new go-to guide for all things edtech. Whether you have questions about the latest tools, ethical AI use, or using technology to help craft better lesson plans, assessments, and more, The Wired Classroom is your ultimate resource. Packed with expert insights, innovative strategies, and practical tips tailored to your unique role as an educator, it’s designed to enhance your teaching *and* help drive deeper engagement. Recent issues have covered topics like “7 AI Tools That Help Teachers Work More Efficiently” and “Helping Students Use AI Creatively Without the Temptation of Cheating.” To join Edutopia’s community of educators already leveraging tech to transform their classrooms, head to cultofpedagogy.com/wired to supercharge your pedagogy.
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Now here’s my conversation with Megan Sumeracki about metacognition.
GONZALEZ: Hey, Megan. Welcome to the podcast.
SUMERACKI: Hi. Thanks for having me.
GONZALEZ: We are going to be talking about metacognition today, but before we do, just give us a little bit of background on your sort of education history and also the book that you wrote that we’re going to be kind of referencing today.
SUMERACKI: Yeah, absolutely. So I am a cognitive psychologist. I specialize in learning and memory, and I’m now a professor. I was just promoted this, in the last few months, to full professor.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So I’ve, I’ve reached the, you know, the level that I’m supposed to care about reaching. And so I’m a professor at Rhode Island College, and I do research, and I teach in the classroom with adult learners. I’ve done research in classrooms with fourth graders and many years ago I was also a substitute teacher in Indiana when I was in college. So I have some experience in K-12, but I absolutely would not pretend that being a substitute teacher or a research assistant in the classroom with fourth graders is the same. But I at least have, have been in there, so I know a little bit. And I, my most exciting work, the stuff that I, that I really get jazzed about these days is my work with the Learning Scientists. And our goal with that project is really to try to communicate with educators in lots of different spheres about the science of learning and how we can infuse evidence-based practice into the classroom, what challenges teachers are, are experiencing in their classrooms that we can help with, so really sort of a back and forth to try to figure out where can the research help, what research do we need, so, you know, what other questions should we be asking. What things should we be paying attention to that researchers don’t realize we should be paying attention to, but these other educators are thinking, like, hey, you can’t do that, or hey, this is a real problem. So that kind of back and forth. And just trying to make the research that we do have, the science, accessible. And so to that end we have the Learning Scientists, with an “s,” website, learningscientists.org with lots of free resources. And then we have together written a couple of books, and the one that we’re really kind of focusing on today, one of the more recent, is called “Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better.” The book is all about how students, mostly high school, early level undergraduate, some middle schoolers might find this accessible as well, how they can use evidence-based study strategies as well as sort of the other things that we know about the science of learning, how they can use that to make their independent learning more effective and efficient. And I think teachers of younger kids as well will find perhaps taking a look at this can give them some practical tips too. It is student-facing, but I think educators are excited about this book as well. And it’s illustrated, and we tried to make the illustrations as diverse as possible with lots of different people being able to see themselves in the illustrations. That was a really, a goal that we had and something we had in our mind, and we consulted with a couple of colleagues who do work in that space. I’m sure we didn’t get it perfectly right. I don’t think anybody ever does, but we did do the best we can, and I hope that lots of different people can see themselves in this book.
GONZALEZ: If you, if anyone listening is hearing you talking about the Learning Scientists and they’re thinking that sounds a little bit familiar, that is because this is actually your second time on the podcast. You were on Episode 58. This is going to be Episode 232, so it was a long time ago that you and Yana Weinstein came on, when Learning Scientists was still pretty new.
SUMERACKI: Yeah, yeah.
GONZALEZ: And that was 2016. So there was, I’ll link back to that in the show notes for this one for people to go back and see that because that’s where you all shared sort of like the core strategies that you were distributing at that time, you know, for students to learn and study with.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. Yeah, and we still talk about these strategies because those are strategies that have been grounded in evidence for decades, even centuries in some cases. And so they weren’t just, like, hot and new at the time, and we’ve moved on. We still talk about them because they’re key. But there are other, there are other things that we can talk about as well, and that’s where we’re focusing. We don’t want to redo that episode, right? We want to focus on other pieces, yeah.
GONZALEZ: Right, yes.
SUMERACKI: Yeah, absolutely.
GONZALEZ: So the book is called “Ace That Test: The Student’s Guide to Learning Better.” Your site is learningscientists.org, and your team has, I can see that your, the team has changed and evolved over time. But what we’re going to focus on today once, when we reconnected, is to, you know, what are some new things we can talk about, not new things but different things, different focuses.
SUMERACKI: Yes.
GONZALEZ: And so today we’re just going to talk about metacognition, which is one of my favorite words in education just because it’s, like, super fancy, and when somebody explains it to you, it’s like, oh yeah, I know, I get that. And it’s, it’s important and I don’t know that we’ve given it enough attention in, when we talk about learning and classroom practice and stuff. So start us off by explaining what exactly is metacognition.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So there’s sort of two components we can talk about with metacognition. Metacognition broadly is just you’re thinking about your own thinking so your own sort of awareness of your cognitive processes. And in the context of learning and education, it’s knowing what you know and also knowing what you don’t know. We can break it down into two kind of core pieces. Metacognitive monitoring, which we could also just call metacognitive awareness, and I think that term awareness is a little more grounded. And if you say metacognitive awareness to a student, they might be more likely to kind of know what that means.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So monitoring or awareness is our own assessment of what we know. So this is where we determine, okay, what do I know well? What do I not know? And what is in between? Can we be aware of our own knowledge? And then metacognitive control or we could call this metacognitive action if we wanted to, that’s how we refer to it in the book, but the formal term is metacognitive control. That’s really just the decisions that we make, and those decisions hopefully are based on accurate monitoring. And so if we can assess and become aware of what we know and what we don’t know, and then use that to drive the decisions that we make about learning, whether that is studying more or studying differently or waiting a little bit and studying later, whatever the case may be. It could also be in the context of taking a test. Do I, do I select an answer and move on? Do I think about this more? You know, what are the decisions that we make based on our assessment? In theory, these two things should work really well together. So the goal is really, can we identify what we know? And can we identify what we don’t know? It sounds very simple, but this can break down pretty easily, as we’ll talk about.
GONZALEZ: Okay, well, then let’s get into it. We’re going to be talking today basically about how this metacognition can be optimized so that, you know, we can make the most use of it for our learning. So how do these two things, the metacognitive monitoring and the control. How do they work together to optimize learning?
SUMERACKI: Right. So what should happen, right, is we should, we should monitor and make, be aware of what we know and what we don’t know. And we can, we can think about this in my, in my cognitive psychology brain, I’ve got like a little two by two grid, right? So there’s sort of two ways to be wrong and two ways to be right. So we can know what we don’t know and also know what we know. And if we know those things, this is where the word “know,” we just keep saying know, know, know over and over again.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: If we know those things, we have accurate monitoring.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
SUMERACKI: So a person cannot understand anything.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: But if they recognize that they don’t understand, that is accurate metacognitive monitoring.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
SUMERACKI: The problem of course is that we can be both overconfident or under confident. So there can be times where we think we know when we don’t, and there can be times where we think we don’t know when we do. And, you know, neither of those are great but the overconfidence can really cause problems because if we think we know but we don’t, and we’re using that assessment, that sort of faulty awareness to drive our decisions, we are likely going to make the wrong decisions. And the problem is that our monitoring is not always accurate. It’s not like we can just sort of open our heads, take a look, and see: Is the information there or isn’t it, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Like, you could go to a library, and you could, you know, if you know where a book is supposed to be, you can look and you can see if it’s there or it’s not.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And if it’s not there, you can say it’s not where it’s supposed to be.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: If it is there, great. But that’s not how our memory works. That’s not how learning works. And we can’t just look. Instead, our awareness is driven by cues from, most of the time just from our experiences and some of those cues tend to lead to more accurate assessments and some of them don’t. And so the fact that our monitoring is not always accurate is important to understand. So if we ask a group of students, how well do you think you understand this? Are you, you know, are we good? Can we move on? Their responses may or may not be accurate, depending on a lot of different factors. And so the way to optimize in education, I think, is to focus on the ways that we can help our students monitor, assess, so become aware, in a more accurate way. And the more accurate they are, the better those control decisions will be. A clear example, at least one that I think is, is pretty clear, and this will probably resonate, especially for the listeners who have been around for a while listening to your podcast and listened to Episode 50-something, 58 I think you said, is the difference between re-reading and retrieval practice.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: So we know from over a century of research that retrieval practice tends to produce learning, and it tends to produce durable long-term learning, much more so than re-reading. We know, again, from years and years and years, decades, centuries of research that repeated reading most of the time isn’t super effective. Now, there are caveats and nuances to both of those statements. There are times when reading again can be more effective. There are times when it makes sense to do that. There are times when retrieval practice maybe isn’t the thing to do right in this moment, but by and large, retrieval practice really does improve learning and repeated reading, especially the way students tend to do it where they just go over and over and over again the same things, does not tend to be particularly effective. But, when you are re-reading something, the first time through it might not make as much sense. It might be difficult. There might be words you don’t understand or it’s just not going to be as solid as the second time you read it. The second time you read it, it’s a little bit more fluent, it’s a bit more familiar. It feels like you know it better, and so as you’re reading and re-reading and re-reading, each time it becomes more fluent and familiar, you get this sense of, wow, I really know this. I really understand it. I’m going to remember it. I’ve learned it. And that feeling of knowing and being confident is not exactly accurate. We know that when there’s a little bit of time, and then we take that reading away, it’s very difficult for the students to, in their own words, describe and explain what they just read, especially when we’re talking about a few days or weeks later. And so when they’re reading, their metacognitive monitoring is too high, they’re overconfident, they think they know and will remember things that they don’t.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: That leads them to think that they’ve got a really strong understanding, and they think that they can put it away or that they don’t need to keep reading or that they don’t need to use other strategies. And then when it comes time to take a test or they need to use the information or, you know, a couple weeks later when maybe the test has gone by, and maybe their cramming was somewhat successful, but now we’re building on what we learned the last time. Now they’re not going to remember it as well. Whereas, when you practice retrieval, it is difficult in the moment. You read something or you’ve learned about something, and then you put it aside, and you have to try to produce it on your own. It’s a difficult task. It does not feel familiar or fluent. Maybe the task does if students are, you know, doing a lot of retrieval practice in their classrooms, but the content is often difficult to retrieve. And students don’t always retrieve everything. We think that, you know, perfect is what’s necessary, but if they just have to try to remember what they read in a couple of paragraphs, they might only remember half, and half feels bad. It feels like they’re failing.
GONZALEZ: Yes. And I’m going to, I’m going to pause you for one second because I’ve done a lot on my site for years now to push out what retrieval practice is, but if a brand-new teacher is listening to this, and this is the first time they’ve ever heard the term, let’s do a super quick review of what retrieval practice is. I’m hoping everyone listening is like, I know this already. But remind us, what is retrieval practice?
SUMERACKI: Thank you. And you know what, I meant to do that, and then I totally forgot.
GONZALEZ: That’s okay.
SUMERACKI: Yep. Retrieval practice is bringing information to mind from memory. It can be done in a lot of ways. So what I was just talking about is putting everything away, taking out a blank sheet of paper, and writing or maybe even sketching what you can remember from your memory. Sometimes people talk about this as the quote/unquote testing effect. When you take a test, when you answer questions, you’re retrieving information from memory. You could do this by speaking, so you just asked me a question, what is retrieval practice? I am retrieving it from my memory.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: I’m describing what it is. So talking, explaining to each other, that can be retrieval practice.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
SUMERACKI: And doing that without the crutch of the material in front of you is difficult. And that difficulty often leads students to think that they don’t know it as well as when they have the crutch there, and they can just keep reading.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Reading is easier than producing it. The problem, of course, is that, so if you ask students, we’ve done experiments like this. One example is, a classic example is Roediger and Karpicke from 2006, which is one of the most highly cited papers on this at this point, and retrieval practice wasn’t even new then. There’s papers all the way back to 1909, but they really revived it in 2006.
GONZALEZ: Wow.
SUMERACKI: They, they compared this. They said, okay, we’re going to have you read over and over and over again or we’re going to have you read once and then keep practicing retrieval without feedback.
GONZALEZ: Wow.
SUMERACKI: The students in that experiment didn’t actually get feedback at all. They just had to keep retrieving. And then when you asked them to make predictions about what they know and what they, you know, how well they think they’ll do on a test, whether it’s going to be in five minutes or two days or a week later, the students that repeatedly read are massively overconfident. The students that practice retrieval have much lower predictions, and if we were to stop there, we would, we would think oh wow, reading works, and that’s probably why students do it all the time. They think that it works.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: It feels good, and our, they’re probably using metacognition, they’re using their, their system to say, okay, how well do I know this? What do I do? The problem is that the activity and the cues that they’re getting are tricking them. In two days or a week, as long as there’s a bit of a delay, when we’re talking about a more long-term learning, but I don’t mean “long-term” like years. Well, I do mean years, but also, I’m talking about even just a few days. When we then look at performance, those who practiced retrieval performed much better than the students who re-read. And the students that practiced retrieval were actually slight, in that experiment, slightly under confident on average. And they tended to think that they didn’t know it quite as well as they did, probably because they had to face some harsh realities about what they did or didn’t know about the text. One of them was sea otters, right. So they’re like, I can only remember half of this. So they don’t think they’re going to do as well. The students that repeatedly read were massively overconfident. So, you know, we’ve got to, in education I think, to really use this system, this metacognitive system well that we have. We have to try to encourage our students to use situations or to pay attention to cues that lead them to make more accurate assessments, even if that means it doesn’t feel as great, even if that means we might be slightly under confident.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So I have this with my college students all the time. I’ll have students who think that they’re really well prepared, and then they don’t do very well on a test or an exam or, you know, some sort of assessment in the class that’s for a grade. And, you know, some students are like, ah, she didn’t ask us the right things. Other students are like, I don’t understand. I studied for hours. What do I do?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: What did I do wrong? And it’s usually because they just, they read and read and read. They highlighted.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: They re-read what they highlighted. And the highlighter’s not bad. It could be used for good, it’s just that the way it’s being used is, is a crutch in this way, right? They feel like because they highlighted it, and now they’re re-reading it, they’re going to remember, but that’s just re-reading. When I can convince students to practice retrieval, and of course I try to do that as much as I can.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: When I convince students to practice retrieval on their own and I make them, give them lots of quizzes, they often come into the test, they’re like, I don’t know, Dr. Sumeracki. I don’t know if this is going to go well. And then they’re the ones that ace it. They do really well.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And so. And this isn’t just about test performance. I care about, you know, meaningful learning and making connections and applying and all of this long-term stuff, but some of that is being assessed on the exam, and of course, you know, that’s what’s going on in the moment. And I, I do think that the students that practice retrieval and have a durable understanding of what they’re learning, they are better off when they go to the next course where they have to use that information.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And so it’s really all about trying to make our assessments, our awareness more accurate so that we can make the correct decisions.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. I almost wonder, you know, when you talk about that, that Roediger study, if teachers couldn’t just replicate that a little bit with their students and put their students into two groups, have a short reading of some kind, and have some of them do, where you can actually show them, you know, viscerally. But I just, I think sharing the research in general with students can be really powerful for getting their buy-in. I think a lot of times teachers will either encourage or insist on a practice without ever explaining what’s behind it, and I think it’s just so much harder to get people on board if they don’t really get why, and there’s really good reasons behind it, so you might as well tell them.
SUMERACKI: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So along those lines, what are some things that teachers can do to make metacognitive monitoring and awareness more effective, you know, for our students, with our students and so on.
SUMERACKI: Yeah, so there’s sort of two key things to do that has sort of fallen out of the research, two key things that can make the assessment, our metacognitive monitoring, awareness, whatever we want to call it, more accurate.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
SUMERACKI: One of them is to make the assessment while the information is not in front of you. So essentially retrieving as opposed to, you know, looking at it. So when you’re reading something, you don’t want the students just to read it and say, do I understand this? Certainly understanding what you’re reading, you know, is important and that’s one piece, but the test isn’t going to be, can I read this thing fluently and quickly —
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: — you know, in front of a class or maybe just on my own, right. That’s not the point. If it was, then we should do that a lot.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And use that to drive our assessments. But what we want to know is can the students remember it and describe it and explain it in their own words. And so asking them to do that and putting the material away will give them a better understanding of how well they can do that task in the future. And again, I’m not just talking about, you know, can they regurgitate what they just read, and does that mean that they’ve now memorized it and, you know, two days from now they can write out the exact definition. Retrieval practice could be done that way. You could try to memorize specific words and retrieval would be great for that, but it’s more than just that. It can also involve putting things in your own words, can you recognize them in examples, can you describe and explain it? The first step to using information is of course to be able to remember that information, and so, you know, there’s something to that. It’s not that we shouldn’t know things. But this isn’t about just promoting facts in isolation or memorizing facts. This is, can I describe it and explain it? And so having them put their material away and either doing a practice test or just can you describe and explain it to group members in a study group? Or can you write it out, can you sketch it out? Can you do that? And do that explicitly. I have some research about just bringing information to mind without writing it, typing it, speaking it. That can work to promote learning and memory, but it doesn’t always work as well with complex materials. It can be difficult to get students to do that fully, and there’s some research by Sarah Tauber and colleagues, I believe. Yeah, Sarah Tauber and colleagues, showing that that can inflate metacognitive monitoring, so they think they know it better when they just kind of think it in their head than if they have to literally write it or speak it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So since we’re talking about metacognition here, you definitely want them to produce it explicitly because that forces them to really figure out: Can I put this in my own words?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: If it’s just in your head, it’s easy to be like, oh yeah, I got it.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And that’s better than having it in front of you.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: But it’s not as good as, can I literally produce this? And so stopping and having students write or speak or type, the modality doesn’t so much matter.
GONZALEZ: So giving them regular retrieval practice. Like if I am a science teacher, for example, an eighth-grade science teacher, doing something for regular retrieval practice. Would you then also add on a piece after or during that where there’s an assessment of, like a metacognitive assessment? Sort of like, now that we’ve done this, where would you put yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of how well you’re understanding, like, this concept or something?
SUMERACKI: Yeah, and I would do that, I would do that explicitly.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
SUMERACKI: So have them engage in the retrieval practice and then have them monitor, assess, how well they think they know it.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
SUMERACKI: And not doing just one or the other, right.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
SUMERACKI: So we want to kind of highlight, okay, this is giving you a sense of how well you know this and how well you don’t. Make that judgment, but not just relying on the judgment, not just saying, how well do you think you know it?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: Because that’s when you’re going to get more of that covert retrieval. So it’s not in front of you. You have to retrieve it, but it’s not forcing you to produce it.
GONZALEZ: So pairing that, pairing the retrieval practice with the metacognitive sort of like moment.
SUMERACKI: Yep.
GONZALEZ: Okay, okay.
SUMERACKI: The other key thing is spacing. So another strategy that we talk about, spacing is just inserting a space in between learning. So rather than studying for five hours, you do an hour each day. Or rather than presenting stuff in class all just once and then, you know, we don’t really talk about it much later or we don’t, we don’t, you know, we build on it, but we don’t really re-review, spreading that out to the extent that’s possible. Inserting a little bit of space between the presentation of information and when you make the assessment is going to lead to more accurate judgments. Because of course the judgment we’re making, how well are we going to remember this thing and how, do we know it? Have we learned it? That usually isn’t, how well do I know it five minutes from now? It might if a student is cramming. That might be a relevant question, but that’s not necessarily what we want to encourage. We often want our students to learn and remember things in the longer term. We want them to have that knowledge, and it should become background knowledge for the next, the next class, the next lesson, the next grade level, whatever. And so putting a space in between can make the judgments more accurate. Reading, re-reading does actually help if we’re cramming. So if you read something really fast right before a test, and then you quick take the test —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: — you probably will remember it better. And so your judgment wasn’t necessarily wrong in that case, it’s just that we are not very good at estimating how much we’re going to forget, especially since the forgetting curves — I’m getting a little bit technical — but the forgetting curves when we use different strategies are different. Retrieval and spacing tend to sort of slow the forgetting curve or make it more shallow. Forgetting is quite rapid after repeated reading. And we just can’t deal with those, we don’t, we can’t make those judgments super well.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
SUMERACKI: And so putting in a little bit of space. What this means practically for a teacher is it’s okay to present information and then have students try to retrieve it and say, okay, how well, how well do you know this? But then try that again. So if you, if you give a lesson on a Monday, and then you’ve got them on Tuesday, at the beginning of class on Tuesday, okay, can we try to retrieve what we talked about yesterday?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Or maybe it’s been two days or a week, whatever the schedule is. And then okay, how well, how well do we know it? And there is some forgetting over time. That’s okay.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: Reviewing, engaging in that retrieval practice and giving a little bit of feedback does help to slow that forgetting curve. So it’s improving learning overall, and it’s also making our metacognitive monitoring more accurate and more grounded into what we actually know.
GONZALEZ: Yes, yeah.
SUMERACKI: So those two things, I mean they do both, right? They help us judge what we know and what we don’t know more accurately, and they help us learn more in the long run. So you kind of can’t go wrong in my, in my opinion.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
SUMERACKI: Yeah, and the other thing I’d say is, you know, encourage control decisions based on knowing that sometimes we’re overconfident. So if, sometimes students just, they are in a position where they need to read something. They don’t understand it yet. They can’t put it into their own words. That is a case where reading, or having it explained to them, or doing some other activity makes sense. But then you, we wouldn’t want them to say, oh, well now it makes more sense now that I’ve read it. I guess I know it now. So the control decision is, well, I’ve read it. I now understand it better right now. I need to revisit this again tomorrow. We need to revisit this again in a few days, because I know that I’m probably going to forget some of this over time. That’s probably more difficult to get the students to do, but especially for the students that are a little bit older and they’re making that transition from, to becoming more independent learners, sort of the ones that will go off to college or university, you know. The goal is to kind of transition them into taking a lot more control. And that’s true across, you know, from middle school to high school. They start to kind of take more control over time. For those that are making that transition, helping them make their own study decisions based on knowing that repeated reading and highlighting might help at some point, but that it’s not, it’s not the only choice and it’s not always the best choice. And just sort of normalizing that learning is hard and it’s okay. It’s not a failure if you know you don’t know something.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: That’s really good.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: If you only know half of it, that’s great, and that means you’re using strategies that are probably more effective. So when that assessment, when, you know, when you start to focus on the monitoring and you, students are like, but I just don’t know it, that doesn’t feel good. Rather than throwing it all away, sort of normalizing that yes, this is difficult. You’re not going to get it immediately. It is going to take more practice. It’s okay to not know early on, and in fact that’s what we would expect. If you think you know it immediately, maybe you do, but maybe, maybe you’re overconfident and we don’t necessarily, we don’t want that because that’s not going to lead to the best outcome in the long run.
GONZALEZ: Right. I would think too that, you know, a teacher can do a whole lot of just modeling of this kind of approach and this kind of mindset when they talk about their own learning and their own approach to things. And if you can kind of make that part of the classroom culture, that can go a long way over the course of, like, a school year.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. Yeah, and I even sometimes use some people call them exam wrappers. I usually put it on, I have exit tickets in my university level classes where the students, after an exam or an assessment of some sort, in class, I’ll say okay, you know, once it’s graded, I’ll actually say did you do as well as you thought you would? Are you where you want to be? And you know, sometimes they are, sometimes the students earning a C-plus, maybe that’s all they need, right. There are competing priorities and even just among the different courses but in their lives and, you know, they have, they should set their goals appropriately for them. And so I want them to decide. I don’t want to just say the A-students are where they should be and everyone else isn’t, right. They should decide. Are you where you want to be? And if you are, what did you do that you think helped? And write down one thing that you’re going to keep doing over the next few weeks.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And if you’re not, is there something that you, that you did or didn’t do that you want to change? What are you going to do to show improvement over the next few weeks? And by having them think about that exam as sort of a point to use monitoring, how well, how well am I learning this stuff? What have I been doing? Did I remember as much as I thought I would? And what can I do moving forward, creating an implementation intention? I think it makes it more likely, and there’s some research showing that it’s going to make it more likely that they will execute that moving forward.
GONZALEZ: Megan, where can people go to learn more from you?
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So learningscientists.org — with an “s” — has tons of resources. The goal was to make as much of this as possible freely available, and so we have a blog with over 500 posts at this point because we started writing them in 2016, and they live in an archive. And so you can search that blog. I will say that the, the search feature on the blog, we use Squarespace, and the search feature sometimes is wonky and much to many of our dismay and reporting, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting fixed, and there’s nothing that we can really do on our end. But it works a lot of the time. If something, you know, if you type “metacognition” and it doesn’t actually bring anything back, that’s not correct. So there’s, there’s a searchable archive. There’s also like a list of all the different posts you can do, but there’s a tag, we use tags. And there is a metacognition tag that has a number of posts as well. Or you can kind of scroll through the blog and see what you can find. We also have a podcast. We do not put out episodes nearly as frequently as you do, Jenn. We move at a little bit of a, a slower pace. But there are over 80 episodes at this point, and so, you know, that’s another thing. The book too, “Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better,” is a place where we have a whole chapter on “how do I know what I know?” And that’s a good resource for students as well as educators.
GONZALEZ: Awesome. Thank you so much for this. And we’re going to be having you back to talk about multitasking next, so if anybody is loving this episode, keep an eye out for that other one too. Thanks so much.
SUMERACKI: Thank you.
For links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, including Megan’s book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 232. To get a bimonthly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.