Activity 3: Assessing Students' Metacognitive Awareness and Cognitive Strategies

Metacognition encompasses knowledge and control of one's own mental processes. Literally, it means "thinking about thinking." In this assignment, you will explain in detail the following five concepts and give age appropriate examples (for childhood & adolescence) that demonstrate each concept:

1. Metacognitive awareness: An important aspect of metacognition, metacognitive awareness is one's explicit, conscious knowledge of one's mental processes. Children who have little metacognitive awareness are apt to mention only external behaviors as they describe what they do when they think and learn. In contrast, children with well-developed metacognitive awareness can describe what and how they think in some detail. They also have a good sense of what their minds and memories can reasonably do-and not do-in a particular situation or learning task.

2. Cognitive strategies: In general, cognitive strategies are specific mental processes in which children actively and intentionally engage in order to enhance their learning and performance. Three commonly used strategies that enhance children's memory for information are these:

3. Rehearsal, in which a child repeats a small amount of information over and over as a way of remembering it for a very short time (e.g., a minute or so).

4. Organization, in which a child identifies interrelationships among pieces of information (e.g., categories, cause-and-effect relationships) as a way of learning and remembering them more effectively over the long run.

5. Elaboration, in which a child draws on prior knowledge to embellish on new information in order to make it more meaningful and memorable.

HINT: Explain each concept & then give an example of appropriate development for childhood & adolescence. (2 examples for each concept)