Metacognition and Reading Apprenticeship

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If only this cartoon painted an accurate picture! It would be a wonderful thing if we could simply download information into our brains as if we lived in "The Matrix." Unfortunately, reading is not a simple process of downloading information. It's neither passive nor automatic. Reading is a process that requires concentration and a great deal of higher order thinking.

I'm sure we've all had the experience of reading a text when, upon concluding a chapter or paragraph, we suddenly come to the realization that we have no idea what we just read. That moment of realization is a metacognitive process. For advanced readers, this level of metacognition comes intuitively. We are reflexively aware of our lack of comprehension, and we then take steps to ameliorate our failure such as by rereading the passage or by deconstructing its meaning. However we choose to address the problem, the critical first step was to know that we don't know. We can then follow up with additional metacognitive techniques. We can ask ourselves,"Why didn't I understand this? Is there a word I don't know? Am I missing the context?" Now, imagine how hard it would be to read effectively if you lacked this awareness. Students struggling to read may not be engaging the material at this level. They may read a passage and not realize their failure to grasp the concepts until they're asked to demonstrate their comprehension. Other students may attain that first level of metacognitive awareness by reporting, "I don't get it," but fail to inquire within themselves what they don't understand, what is preventing them from understanding, and what they can do to attain comprehension.

Luckily, metacognition is a process that the human mind is well equipped to execute. Humans are somewhat unusual creatures in that we're obligately social (yes, you can go live on an island alone with nothing but a volleyball as your companion, but from an evolutionary perspective, this is not a sound fitness strategy), yet, natural selection acts upon us as individuals. This is what separates us from eusocial creatures such as wasps, termites, or naked mole rats that are able to be perfectly selfless because their fitness is transmitted entirely through their queen. The end result is an evolutionary and existential tension in which we must develop both selfless traits (compassion, love, altruism, etc) that allow us to flourish socially and selfish traits (greed, pride, envy, lust, and, well, basically the 7 deadly sins) that contribute to our success as individuals. Similar to a pack of wolves or a pride of lions, we develop social norms and hierarchies that help us to negotiate this tension, but our social structures and networks are far more complex. Consequently, our evolution has honed several adaptations that allow us to alleviate the tension between group and self. Namely, we evolved empathy and the capacity to play iterative non zero sum social games of imperfect information. 

Empathy is simply the ability to perceive and understand the emotions another person is experiencing. This ability is hard wired in our brains. Even infants are able to mimic facial expressions and respond accordingly to sad faces or happy faces. Although it's a mouthful, iterative non zero sum social games of imperfect information simply refers to the social games we play with each other over and over (iterative) that can have win-win or lose-lose outcomes (non zero sum). A game is any activity in which you have multiple strategies to choose from, and your best strategy depends on the strategy used by others. Whether we're aware of it or not, we play social games like these all the time. Imagine you go to a bar with friends. If everyone buys their own beer, a good strategy is to buy your own beer as well. On the other hand, if one friend buys a round for everyone, a good cooperative strategy would be to reciprocate by buying a round as well. If you choose the non-cooperative strategy and buy a beer for yourself after your friends all buy rounds, you may benefit in the short term but find yourself uninvited the next weekend (this is where the iterative component is important). Both empathy and social games are inherently metacognitive processes. Although it's typically automatic, we are constantly asking ourselves, "How does this person feel? Why do they feel this way?" Empathy then informs our choice of strategy with respect to our social games. Lets go back to the bar and imagine we chose the non-cooperative strategy. Empathy may inform us that our friends are unhappy with us. We must then think about what may have caused these emotions. What are they thinking? Why are they thinking it? What can I do to fix the situation? Even if it gets convoluted, our brains are well equipped for processing this type of information as Vizzini will demonstrate (although this is a zero sum game: win-lose).

The point is that metacognition is an intuitive human process, but using metacognition often has to be modeled. Just as we're born with the capacity to dance but don't know how until someone shows us, metacognition is a tool that's already in our toolbox, but someone may need to show us how to apply it to reading. For this reason, I was intrigued by some of the techniques described in the reading apprenticeship article. Reading and "thinking aloud" to the class seems useful for explicitly demonstrating how to apply metacognition to reading comprehension. Having students answer prompts that require metacognitive processes similarly can directly develop these skills. Once these skills are developed, students become more self-sufficient learners and avoid the trap of not knowing while also not knowing they don't know. The lesson as always, never fight a land war in Asia.

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Reference: Joel Brown, my advisor in the ecology and evolution department, is the source of the theory of humans as the supreme adaptation for playing iterative non zero sum games of imperfect information. These ideas derive from his lectures and personal correspondence.