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I'm Janet Metcalfe and I'm a Professor of Psychology at Columbia University.

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I want to tell you about metacognition and why it's important, first of all.

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When kids study, they need to learn how to get control of their own study,

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and it's terribly important for them to be able to control their own learning

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and control it in an effective way.

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So many, many people have done research on metacognition.

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Metacognition is our knowledge of what we know or knowledge of what we've learned.

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If you don't know what you don't know, you can have a very hard time studying appropriately.

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And your teacher or your instructor isn't going to always be able to guide your studying,

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so at some point, you have to take control of it yourself.

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In order to do that you have to have appropriate metacognitions,

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and not only do you have to have that knowledge,

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but you also have to be able to apply it appropriately.

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The best test for that is called a delayed judgment of learning task.

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The way it works is that after you've had the students learn some materials,

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you wait-and you might wait a day or you might wait an hour,

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but you don't do it immediately because if you do it immediately,

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the memory for the material might be in short-term memory,

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so it's not a reliable indication of whether you have really learned, so you have to wait.

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And then, you give only the questions; you don't give the answers.

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So, suppose you're teaching a student American history and you are talking about the Civil War.

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The way you would make a judgment of learning is to give them a question

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that you want them to know the answer to.

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For example, who was the President during the Civil War?

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You don't give them the answer.

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You let them try to retrieve the answer in order to make their judgment of learning.

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And it turns out that if they can retrieve the answer,

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they will give that question a high judgment of learning.

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Later on if you test them, they will get it right on the test;

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the correlation is extremely high.

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If they can't answer the question, then they will give it a low judgment of learning.

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And college students and high school students know that if they give something a low judgment

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of learning, they don't know it, that's what they need to study.

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So it's really effective strategy.

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I think that it would a good idea for the teachers to actually show the students how to do it

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and provide the materials and maybe even do a practice session in class,

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because they could use it in all their subjects, too.

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A really easy thing that they could do would be to give the children flash cards

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and they tell the children to write the question on one side and write the answers

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on the other side and they make them...they instruct them on going

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through the critical questions, making the judgments of learning-do I know this-but

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without having the answer, of course.

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They make those judgments, they sift those questions that they don't know

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into the "must study" pile, but they should also flip over the answers to the ones

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that they give high judgments of learning to,

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because they might make a mistake on some of those.

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And if they make a mistake, they want to correct those ones, too.

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So it's a simple little procedure.

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They could keep their set of flash cards for a particular set of materials,

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then redo them a couple of nights later.

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They could even chart their progress if they wanted to-"Oh, I am learning more,

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I didn't know as much on Monday night as I know now"-and it's a good method for studying

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for the test and it empowers the student.

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The benefits of this task are twofold:

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first of all-maybe most important-is that it puts the learning in the hands of the learner,

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so that the student himself can do it; so it's an effective way for someone who wants

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to learn some material to both improve their learning and also to take control of what they need

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to study and what they don't need to study.

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Now, you need to know the right things to study;

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you don't want to study the things that you have learned already.

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But you have to make that assessment correctly,

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or you're going to end up studying inappropriately.

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So by making a judgment of learning that's accurate,

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the students are in a position to study the right things that are going

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to help their learning, and they can do it themself.

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The second benefit is that the task itself has benefits.

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The task itself is one where the student is testing themselves

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and in order to make the judgment-do I know it, don't I know it-they have to test themselves.

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And there are many papers right now that have been showing that the effects

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of tests are beneficial to learning.

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That's especially true if the person is successful,

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so if they get the answer right, that memory is strengthened.

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If they get the answer wrong, you don't get any memory benefit from the judgment

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of learning task, but what you know is that you have to go back and study it.

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So it's a very efficient way, you get a benefit of the test and you know what you have to study.

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