International Journal of Technology and Design Education 7: 161-180, 1997. 1997

Metacognition
Metacognition, or what is often called strategic knowledge, refers to our awareness of our own thinking processes while performing specific tasks. This is an important factor in intelligence, learning, and problem solving. Metacognition involves the planning that takes place before we begin a thinking activity, regulation of our thinking as we work through the activity, and evaluation of the appropriateness of our thinking after completing the activity. This type of thinking includes strategies such as self-monitoring, advance planning, self-checking, questioning, summarizing, predicting, generating alternatives, and evaluating.


CRITICAL ISSUES CONFRONTING EDUCATION
Before discussing instructional approaches that can enhance the develop­ment of conceptual understanding and intellectual skill, there are several critical issues confronting education that need to be addressed. These issues include problems with specialized courses designed to teach thinking skills, concerns about the failures of learning transfer, and doubts about the ability of formal education to teach what is needed in the world of work.


The failure of specialized “thinking ” courses
There have been many attempts to develop courses that emphasize the devel­opment of intellectual skills. Few of these attempts have been successful (Ellis & Fouts, 1993). Specialized “thinking” courses are based on the belief that thinking can be divided into specific skills that can be taught and then combined into larger applications of thought. This is a very simplistic view.
Part of the reason these courses fail is because they ignore the impor­tance of content knowledge as a major factor in the application of intellectual skills (Newell & Simon, 1972). Cognitive research has clearly established the link between content knowledge and intellectual processes. Chase and Simon (1973), in their classic study of chess experts, found that the superior performance of chess masters could be attributed more to their ability to recognize board layout patterns from past experience than to superior mental capabilities. In fact, Chase and Simon found that when the chess masters were confronted with random chess layouts, the experts performed like novices. Evidence of the importance of teaching intellectual processes within the context of a domain of knowledge is also provided by Chi et al. (1981). In a study of the thought processes of experts and novices in physics, Chi and colleagues found that the two groups approached mechanics problems very differently. The better performance by the experts was attributed to their deeper conceptual understanding of physics prin­ciples. Without a conceptual understanding of the field, the novices’

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intellectual skills were inadequate for solving the same problems. The designers of “thinking” courses also fail to realize that in order to develop a specific thinking skill you must already possess the larger thinking processes.
Rather than view thinking as a set of discrete skills that can be learned and combined into a larger set of processes, it may be better to view the development of intellectual skills as a cyclic process of refining and honing the ability to think critically, creatively, and conceptually. This approach acknowledges the fact that learners already possess the ability to think. The fundamental issue is that thinking skills cannot be taught in isolation from content and context.