#185 – The Acquisition of ‘Knowledge’

(A-Z of Metacognition) – R for Reframing

Hi Everyone

Over this series we’ve been looking at some of the more subtle aspects of metacognition, both to demonstrate the enormous value it brings to academic progress, and to provide a strong rationale for developing it in our learners. In this issue ‘reframing’ comes up for discussion because, for me, the whole purpose behind metacognition is to allow us to constantly reframe our knowledge base.

I was most grateful recently to receive a message from Phil Strong, a long-standing connection on Linked In, who often sends me what he calls ‘brain candy’, articles that he thinks will strike a chord. This one was the work of Harish Jose, a cybernetics engineer, who enjoys providing a 360degree perspective on topics related to his passion.

In an article entitled; ‘What Is the Right Word?’, Harish takes a long look at whether AI systems can be said to have ‘knowledge’ in the same way that humans have it. One of his observations in particular struck a chord with me, that humans don’t just learn with their brains, we incorporate information physically too, and that comes from ‘experience’.

The importance of children learning from their own experiences is something you will have heard me wax lyrical about before, and that’s because more of the senses are involved, the brain is switched on as a result of natural curiosity, and mistakes are made which register as vital feedback in the brain. We need to ask whether students are really ‘learning’ or are just memorising information?

One of the major differences in the ‘knowledge’ held by an AI system over that held by a human being, is to quote Harish, that it’s ‘one step removed from the living of it’. That means what accumulates in a non-human system is merely a ‘record’ rather than a ‘history’ and that knowledge is ‘acquired’ rather than being ‘incorporated’.

Those are subtle, but important differences relating to how our minds work, and for me, the most telling reference from the article was that as humans we have the ‘scars’ that come from learning through experience. We embody knowledge in a way that is far more nuanced than just storing information for future use. Making mistakes and adjusting our thinking based on the feedback from them, is a vital part of the learning process.

Shouldn’t that make us stop and think about what’s happening in classrooms? If we’re purely teaching for knowledge acquisition, and the information is not being incorporated or embodied by the students, are we really providing an education that will be assimilated in a way that genuinely improves a learner’s chances for a better future?

Adding metacognition to the developing skills of all children and young people will help to alleviate some of this problem. They don’t need to collect further physical or mental scars in order to move forward academically, but they do need the ability to reason on what’s not going well and reframe it in order to move closer to the success that they’re looking for.

That’s where we come in as parent and educators. Do we allow students of all ages and abilities, the time and space that they need in order to recognise errors, assess the problem, reframe it, and then use a different approach to see what happens? And if that doesn’t work, do they feel free to go through the same process again without someone getting exasperated with them or telling the ‘the answer’.

That reframing is what lies behind successful decision making, pulling together all the available information to find the most effective way of moving forward. An individual’s internal framework can only be built from what they ‘know’ so far, which means that new information coming in may highlight the need to reconstruct parts of it. That in turn may provide the foundation for proceeding in a different direction from previously.

How confident are our students at changing their minds, and experimenting with the possibilities in order to update or reframe what they know. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘reframe’ as; ‘to change the way something is expressed or considered’. That’s exactly why metacognition is available as a skill (performed by the pre-frontal cortex of the brain), to allow reasoning on one’s own thought processes in order to work out a better way.

Are our children and young people growing in knowledge through constant reframing because we’ve taught them how to think in a metacognitive way, or are they just memorising facts? Remember that stored knowledge without having the scars that come from experience, could be considered ‘artificial intelligence’. Let’s not create that conundrum for future generations.

Warm regards

Liz