Metacognition and Embodied Learning

Metacognition 

Metacognition, a term that was first defined by John H. Flavell in 1979, is basically thinking about thinking. With metacognition, we become aware of our own learning experiences and the activities we involve ourselves in our paths toward personal and professional growth. We are better able to understand ourselves in the whole process of learning and can develop skills to think about, connect with, and evaluate our learning and interactions each day. According to Flavell, metacognitive knowledge is “knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes or products.

Metacognition has been identified as an essential skill for learner success. It allows students to drive their learning, build student agency, and foster a growth mindset in learning.

In order to develop metacognitive skills and habits in the classroom

•        First, students must have the opportunity to practice and so must be placed in situations that require metacognition. They should know the meaning and importance of metacognition, and the development of the capacity for it must be an explicit goal for both teacher and student. This goal must have a credible and enduring presence in the established curriculum and in assessments.

•        Second - connecting to Vygotsky's teachings -metacognition can and should be modelled. When a teacher "thinks aloud," particularly during problem solving, his or her verbalizations can be a powerful source of cognitive processing that can be internalized by students. This has been called cognitive modeling, or "making thinking audible."

•        Third, just as teachers should model metacognition, social interaction among students should be used to cultivate their metacognitive capacity. If students are encouraged and guided to think critically together, then their spoken reasoning will ideally make their cognitive tools available to one another. 

In metacognitive learning a key challenge for teachers is being able to recognise how well their students understand their own learning processes.

References

Flavell, John H. 1979. “Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring: A New Area of Cognitive-Developmental Inquiry.” American Psychologist 34 (10): 906–911. 

Descartes was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today. Dualism is the view that the mind and body both exist as separate entities. Descartes / Cartesian dualism argues that there is a two-way interaction between mental and physical substances. Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. Descartes  described on one side the body as a material “machine” containing organs and following the laws of nature. On the other side, he described the mind as non-material and independent of the laws of nature. The interaction between body and mind would be enabled by the pineal gland, the “seat of the soul.”

Rationalism has strongly influenced cognitive sciences in the 20th century. Fodor et al. (1974) described the mind as a set of computational operations subdivided in modules that are defined in terms of their function. Originally, Fodor saw no connection between a module and the reference world outside. He separated the mind from the body in the manner of Cartesian philosophy.  This was the core idea behind the view that, when acquiring knowledge, we sit quietly and concentrate on our “mental” task(s). With the advent of neuroscience, Rationalism has been greatly challenged. Theories of embodied cognition suggest that the mind is not an abstract and isolated entity. Rather the mind is integrated into the body’s sensorimotor systems. The embodied view of cognition is grounded in sensory and motor experiences (Engel et al., 2013; Mahon and Hickok, 2016). 

Embodied learning refers to pedagogical approaches that focus on the non-mental factors involved in learning, and that signal the importance of the body and feelings. Embodied Learning constitutes a contemporary pedagogical theory of learning, which emphasizes the use of the body in the educational practice and the student-teacher interaction both inside and outside the classroom and in digital environments as well.

Embodied learning is;

• ·  Experiential
• ·  Practical
• ·  Hands on
• ·  Physical
• · Activates cognitive, affective and somatic dimensions

In accordance with the constructivist principles, the body is used both inside and outside classroom for experiential learning and is not treated as a place of learning. The principles of Embodied Learning provide answers to questions related to the ways knowledge is constructed by students as they leave behind them the academic model of perceiving knowledge and treat each student as a whole, while they view everyone’s body as a tool for knowledge construction and as a knowledge carrier.

References:

Asher, J. J. (1969). Total physical response technique of learning. J. Spec. Educ. 3, 253–262. doi: 10.1177/002246696900300304

Fodor, J., Bever, T. G., and Garrett, M. F. (1974). “The psychology of language,” in An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Generative Grammar, eds J. A. Fodor, T. G. Bever, and M. F. Garrett (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill).

Engel, A. K., Maye, A., Kurthen, M., and König, P. (2013). Where’s the action? The pragmatic turn in cognitive science. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 202–209. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.03.006

Mahon, B. Z., and Hickok, G. (2016). Arguments about the nature of concepts: symbols, embodiment, and beyond. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 23, 941–958. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1045-2