Written by: K.Sasikala, Joint Secretary Helikx Open School
Meta Cognitive means thinking about one’s own thinking process. Meta cognitive involves the planning, monitoring and revising of cognitive strategies. Young children, who lack an awareness of their own cognitive process are often ignorant of their incapability, causing them to fail to recognise their own errors. It is one’s awareness of how one solves problem, how one remembers or comprehends written materials.
Cognition refers to those mental activities that involve mental processes, such as thinking, reasoning, understanding, memory and problem solving. One way of studying cognition is to find out how people encode, organise, interpret, store and respond to stimuli.
The learning process of three stages namely,
Selectively attending to the stimulus
Processing the received information
Storing information for retrieval when require.
Cognition enables an individual to identify, interpret, organise and apply information (Merces 1979) Meta cognitive involves overall planning of the cognitive task , self- instruction to complete the task , and performance self-monitoring, or checking to see that each phase of the task is completed appropriately and in the appropriate order.
In essence, meta cognition involves two components
Awareness
Regulation (Loper 1982)
Meta cognitive training focuses on instruction in techniques to monitor and appraise the use of cognitive and meta cognitive skill of the students and suitably transact the curricular content, learner efficiency can be improved.
In remedial teaching we are applying meta cognitive approaches and allow students to use effectively the learning strategies to monitor and regulate their own activities. Regulation of cognition refers to the executive control within information processing and made them to overcome their spelling difficulties by using meta cognitive approach.
A learning strategy involving the use of acronyms to structure inner language which enables students to form visual images while they read in order to enhance recall and reading comprehension. A sample of learning strategy is the RIDER strategy,
Read – Read the first sentence.
Image – Make an image of the material read
Describe – Describe your image
Evaluate – Evaluate your image for completeness. Check to see that your image include as much of information as possible.
Repeat – Repeat the earlier steps for the next sentence.
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