Metacognition and Mindset

In this section, we're going to talk about one overarching question, how do we learn?

I know everyone watching this has successfully learned many, many things in life, from how to drive a car, to how to parent a child. We're all learning all the time. But here's the thing, a lot of how learning works, and how our brains work, turns out to be pretty counterintuitive. And a lot of the ways that we've been taught to think about learning, actually go against the ways that our brains are set up to learn.

What do I mean? Who listening to this has been told at some point "you are a math person." Or, who's been told, "you are not a math person." Most of us have probably gotten one or the other. But the truth is, there's no such thing as a math person. Believing we are though, or that we're not a math person, changes how we learn math. As another example, who was told "practice makes perfect"?

I remember being drilled for hours on my times tables as a kid. Writing out simple problems over and over and over again, in the hopes that if I just wrote them enough times they would stick in my brain. But it turns out, that idea of let me just keep going until it clicks is one of the least productive strategies that we have for long-term learning. So, then what are the productive strategies?

What I'm proposing in this section is that the better we understand our brains the better we'll be able to come up with learning strategies in the classroom, and in life, that can maximize our ability to learn efficiently and to learn deeply.

Now, I'm not a neuroscientist, and I'm not a cognitive psychologist, I am not an expert on the human brain. What I am is a teacher, and a student, and I've worked hard to understand how learning works in the college classroom. I'm going to share with you some key principles that have helped me and my students to learn in the Columbia classroom, and I hope they'll be helpful to you.

Every semester I teach a lesson to new students on growth mindset and I start with a question, who here's a math person? Usually about half the class raises their hand. Then I ask, who's not a math person? The other half raises their hands. And then I tell them the trick, everyone who raised your hand is wrong.

There's no such thing as a math person but our belief about whether we are or are not a math person changes how we learn math. The idea of a math person is an example of a mindset. In general, a mindset is a set of ideas or attitudes that we have about something, especially when those ideas are seen as being difficult to alter. It's a personal ideology, a set of assumptions that we use to filter the world around us. When it comes to learning, there's two broad categories of mindset. The first is what's called a fixed mindset which is the idea that intelligence is something we have a certain amount of that can't change that either we are or are not a math person and that's it. The second category is what's called a growth mindset or the recognition that intelligence can grow and develop in response to effort and good strategies.

Growth mindset is a recognition that anyone can learn math and that the more work we put in, the better we'll get. The reason mindset matters is that what we believe directly influences our behavior and by influencing our behavior, influences our learning outcomes. Say you believe that you're a math person and that math is a challenge that you will be able to rise to. When you sit down in class to lecture or you sit down with your textbook to do homework, you're working from the assumption that math is gonna make sense and that you're going to be able to learn the material.

When it gets difficult or when something doesn't make sense, your response will be to ask a question or ask for help and you'll probably keep trying and keep trying new strategies until the idea starts to make sense. On the other hand, if you think you're not a math person, then every time the material gets challenging, you're first thought is probably something like, what's the point of this? I'm not gonna be able to learn this anyway. I know I've had those thoughts myself especially when looking at a really difficult test in front of me.

A fixed mindset assumes that there will be a limit on abilities, a ceiling on what you can learn, and so when you approach learning with a fixed mindset, you interpret negative feedback as proof that you found and hit your ceiling and subconsciously you give yourself permission to stop trying. Now, I wanna be clear, mindset is not magical thinking. It is not believe and therefore succeed, it is not a cat poster. What it is is working from the assumption that you'll be able to be successful so that if something isn't working and if you're not finding success, instead of saying, is this my ceiling? You focus on more useful questions like why isn't this working and what could I be doing differently? Because there's always something you could be doing differently.

Maybe the problem is that you don't have enough prior knowledge and you need to go back a few steps. Maybe it's that the study strategy you're using isn't the most effective strategy for the material or that you're not putting in enough hours and practice to achieve mastery. Whatever the challenge might be, a growth mindset looks to identify and then meet the challenge, asking for help and taking advantage of resources along the way. I'm not a cognitive psychologist, so I won't go into the science here but you should know that the ideas behind growth mindset are how it really works.

Our brains learn and change and adapt in response to our effort. And importantly, that process of learning and changing and adapting our brains, what's known as neuroplasticity, takes work. It doesn't always feel easy and more often than not it's not meant to. Feeling like it's a challenge to learn something new isn't a sign that we're not going to be able to learn. In fact, to a certain extent, it's a sign that we are learning, that we're putting in the effort that we need to change our brains.

My favorite part of teaching this is that for the vast majority of my students this is not new information. I work with nontraditional students, students who come from community colleges, from the military, from the workforce, students with families and lives outside of the university.

My students are not afraid of hard work and they're not afraid of a challenge. Talking about growth mindset, recognizing that struggle is a part of success and that anything worth doing is worth working for is really just reminding ourselves that what we already know to be true in life also applies in education.

What we know is that there's value in hard work, that there is always more than one way to accomplish your goal, that success can mean different things at different times, and that when we're presented with a challenge, the important question is not can I do this but is it worth the time and energy that it's going to take or me to be successful? Keeping that in mind helps me and has helped my students to re-frame some of our learned reactions in the classroom. I hope it's helpful to you.

What happens in our brains when we learn something new? How do we go from zero understanding to being able to use a concept or skill in our daily lives? I'm gonna introduce you to a three-step process through which learning happens. This is not the whole exhaustive picture, but it gives the big idea and it offers a framework that we can use to build strategies for how to make our brains work better for us in the classroom.

When it comes to learning something new, the process of what happens in our brains is a lot like the process of building a library. Say I'm building my own private library and someone gives me a book about car repair. The first step I'm gonna take is to figure out what I'm holding, to look at the back cover, to read the Table of Contents, to skim the chapters to see what this book is about. That step of reading the book for the first time is what's called encoding. Encoding means forming an impression of something. Taking sensory input and forming a representation, or what's called a memory trace in the brain. It happens in our short-term memory, and it's happening all the time.

Every new experience we have, every new impression that's made on us builds a new memory trace. And because we're forming memory traces all the time, not every memory trace gets kept. Not everything gets moved from short-term to long-term memory.

Think of my library. Anyone who's ever collected anything knows that once people know you're collecting, they start giving you things all the time. And as a collector, it's your job to decide what to keep and what to give away. Once my friends and family know that I'm building my library, they're gonna start giving me books left right and center and I'm gonna have to figure out what's useful and what maybe I'm gonna give back. The way I do that is by figuring out how each new book or each new memory trace helps me in my daily life and how it fits with what's already in my library. As someone who drives cars, knowing how to do things like check tire pressure or change the oil would be helpful, so having a book about how to do those things in my library is going to be useful to me. And to make it as useful as possible, I am gonna want to put it somewhere that makes sense where I can find it easily in the future, if and when I need it. That step of figuring out where in my library this book belongs is what's called consolidation.

Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. To put that another way, consolidation takes the new information we've taken in and connects it with other ideas that we already have to what we already know drawing on our prior knowledge. For my library, it means taking the book that I've just decided to keep on car repair and recognizing that it probably belongs over there with my old driver's ed manual that I have from high school.

And maybe next to the book of maps that I've got ready for my next car trip. It also means separating the book from what it isn't, say from my collection of cookbooks or my books on art and photography. If step one was reading the book, step two is taking the book and finding a good home. Step three then is finding the book later on, using my library. Say I wake up one morning and the car won't start. If all I had is a huge building full of books piled at random, it would be impossible to find that car repair manual when I needed it. Even if I had taken the time to organize my library, if that book is in a dark, dusty corner that I haven't visited in years, I'm not necessarily gonna know that I have it, let alone where it is the morning that my car won't turn on.

That last step in the learning process is what's called retrieval, finding and using memories. It turns out that the more regularly we retrieve information, the more regularly we circulate the books in our libraries, the faster we'll be able to find the information in the future, and the more deeply we'll understand it. When you think about it, that makes sense. The more frequently I visit each section in my library, the better I'm gonna be able to know what books are on the shelf. Likewise, the more regularly we recall and use information we've learned, the better we'll be able to find it and apply it in the future.

So, the basic learning process: encoding, or taking in new information, consolidating or organizing it and making connections with what we already know, and retrieving, or using information in practice. Understanding how this process works can give us some practical steps to take in learning and more deeply by letting us choose strategies that work with our brains and what our brains are already wired to be doing.

Every new piece of information that we learn rests on a foundation of prior knowledge. We learn new ideas by connecting them to what we already know, adding them to an existing network of concepts and relationships. The more we know about a subject or an idea, the more easily we can learn, because the more we have to connect back to.

Let me give you an example. My baby nephew Sean has been trying for months to learn his colors. He'll line up his little matchbox cars in a row and my sister will point to one and say, "Sean, what color is that?" For a long time, the answer every time was yellow. Not because all his cars are yellow, but because he knew that yellow was a word people often said after color. And that if he said yellow and he happened to be right, everyone would clap and tell him how smart he was and it would be exciting.

He had one kind of connection, but he didn't have the whole picture. Recently though, Sean figured out what yellow meant. He learned his first color and all of a sudden, the rest of the colors were easy. Once you have the abstract idea of what a color is, you have context and every new color is just an example of an idea you already understand. Learning new colors is just a process of naming what you see and perceive. Obviously, most of what we learn in college and in the world is a whole lot more complex than a baby learning colors. But, the same basic principle holds. It's easier to take in and retain new information when we have a framework, a context to fit it into.

How does this help us in the classroom? If we know prior knowledge is important for learning, then one of the best tools at our disposal in any new learning project is self-assessing prior knowledge. Before we begin, we want to start by asking ourselves two essential questions, what are we trying to learn, and, what do we already know? Asking these questions at the outset helps us confirm we're ready to begin, that our prior knowledge is adequate.

Say I want to learn multivariable calculus, but all I know so far of math is Algebra I. Self-assessing what I know so far helps me recognize that I'm missing Algebra II, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, single-variable calculus. It helps me recognize that I can probably learn multivariable calculus, but it's gonna take extra work and extra time to fill in gaps and it may end up being more time than I'm gonna be able to put in. Assessing what I already know helps me recognize that maybe I'm not ready for that deep learning project. And then maybe I want to go back a few steps to ensure prior knowledge. For yourself in the classroom, you might ask questions like, what do I already know about this topic or field? And have I learned a similar subject or skill? What will my professor expect me to know when I show up in class the first day in terms of facts and background information, but also in terms of the skills and techniques that are used in the field?

The other reason assessing prior knowledge is helpful is just because it forces us to retrieve what we already know. And it reminds us of the connections and associations that are already at our disposal. Consciously taking the time to inventory what we know that's related primes our brains to make connections as we take in that information. And so it helps us distinguish what's new and important from what's already familiar as we go through the lecture and readings, right? It helps us tell when the professor is really excited and we didn't know that yet, from when the professors are reminding us of something that we learned a long time ago. It also sets us up to think about learning as a process of making connections. That same strategy of consciously working to identify new information and how it fits with what we already know where it's not just at the beginning of a project, but at every step along the way.

Self assessment isn't a one-and-done deal, it's a constant foundation that we're working from as we learn. So as we go, we might ask questions like, how does this subject relate to other subjects I've learned in the past? How does each new topic or unit connect with the ones that came before and after? What stories are being told by this information? The effect of this regular self assessment and this effort to connect new ideas to prior knowledge is to foster what's called conceptual learning. If we learn by connecting information to what we already know, then the more connections we can make, the better we'll be able to hold onto that information.

By asking ourselves questions about how ideas connect, we force ourselves to think consciously about those conceptual connections to tell ourselves stories, to draw ourselves maps of how ideas fit together. If we take the time to ask these questions, we can use our understanding of the importance of prior knowledge to set ourselves reasonable learning challenges and help our brains along in the process of making connections that we know to be essential for deep learning.

A lot of the strategies that we gravitate towards as learners are strategies that help learning to feel easy, and in a lot of ways, that makes sense. It's intuitive to look for the moments when something starts to feel easy and use those as evidence that we've achieved mastery. But here's the thing. While that intuition is right in the long term, in the short term, learning is actually supposed to feel like a challenge. It's supposed to take effort. And it turns out that to a certain extent, the more effortful our learning, or in other words, the harder we have to work for it, the more effective it'll be in the long run.

The metaphor I often use with my students is going to the gym. If you bought a membership to a new gym and you went and worked out with a trainer, and at the end of the session, you weren't tired, and the next morning, you weren't even a little bit sore, you'd probably be pretty dissatisfied, right? I know I would. Feeling sore the next morning is part of how you know you got a good workout. It helps you to tell when you need to push harder. Those weights feel easy, I better scale up, or when you need to pull back. That feedback, that soreness, helps you walk the line between wow, that was an amazing workout, and I literally can't stand up right now, maybe I overdid it.

When we're thinking about learning strategies, the same principle applies. Rather than looking for natural talents and places where learning feels easy, instead, we should be looking for ways to feel the burn, so to speak. We should be setting ourselves learning goals that are challenging, and in our specific study practices, we should be looking to introduce that extra element of difficulty, those extra few pounds at the end of the dumbbell, to make sure that we're getting our money's worth for the time that we're putting in. How? One really important strategy for effortful learning is what's called priming the mind. In practice, that means trying to solve a problem before being taught the answer.

The goal is not to come up with a solution right away. Instead, it's to try to figure out what you don't know, and what you'll need to know in order to solve the problem so that you can treat your readings and your lecture like a scavenger hunt, searching for the pieces that you need. Metacognitively, this works by helping increase your brain's recognition of the practical application of the new information. If you know why the information matters, you're more likely to make connections and hold onto it.

The extra effort to try to understand the problem we're not ready to solve helps us build ourselves a context and a need that learning can help us fill. A second strategy is what's called spaced retrieval practice. Spaced retrieval practice works on the idea that forgetting is a really important part of remembering. Rather than sitting and drilling down on one kind of problem for hours on end, that do it until you can do it in your sleep mode of studying, it means breaking up your practice sessions into multiple shorter settings, with ample time in between. This works by allowing a concept to move out of your short-term memory and back into long-term storage, so that each time you sit down to study, you're practicing retrieving the information in addition to applying it.

Put another way, by giving your brain time to forget, you give yourself another opportunity to practice remembering, and each time we remember, it comes a little faster and it sticks a little better than the last time. Another strategy is what's called interleaving, moving back and forth between different kinds of problems and applications of a new concept. This helps us enforce spaced retrieval practice on a faster timeline, but it also helps us make things just a little bit harder. Moving back and forth between different tasks forces us to put forward just a little bit more effort to get our bearings and refocus.

That effort, even though it feels harder in the moment, produces better learning down the line. Think again of the gym. You don't do the same exercises every time you go. You alternate, you interleave, to make sure your muscles don't just adapt to the one task they're given so you don't hit a plateau. Interleaving types of problems does the same thing for our learning that interleaving exercises does for our bodies, upping the level of difficulty so that instead of our brains adapting to perform one specific task or one specific concept in one application, they have to continue to work to identify what task or concept is at stake and learn to apply it in many different contexts.

It takes away familiarity, and in doing so, it keeps us from slipping into studying on autopilot. What these strategies have in common is that they take the unconscious processes that are happening in our brains already, and they add in conscious effort. When it feels easy, it's because we're usually working on autopilot, and it's hard for us to tell how much we're really learning and getting out of a task, whether that gym membership is worth it.

On the other hand, when we choose strategies that take conscious, intentional effort, we've created a feedback loop, where we can feel the work we're putting in, and so we know if it's working. Just like our sore muscles the day after a hard gym session help us to assess whether or not we had a good workout, effortful study practice gives us a way of gauging how we're doing by moving studying off of autopilot and helping us to feel the burn.

You're used to being a high performer. I'm definitely guilty of it, where you find tasks that are difficult, you're able to throw yourself into them and you excel. And even if you're not the best, you're not the gold medalist, you were at the Olympics and so you feel good about that. But then you come up against something.

For me specifically it was French. I don't hear very well and my education was a little squirrelly growing up, so I didn't end up having to take language in school. So I never had to learn a language before. I didn't know a lot of grammatical terms. It was just this flood of information that I couldn't hear well and it's a requirement for getting my degree and I just didn't have the option not to do it. There wasn't a way for me to choose to take something easier or whatever, try though I may have. I just had to grind it out. The way that you approach that with this sort of, if you have this fixed mindset of this is what my natural abilities are and my capacities are and I can't do French, or I'm not a math person, or whatever it is versus coming into something understanding that you didn't know anything about blowing up tanks either before they started teaching you about it in the military.

So that's okay and checking the ego, leaving it aside, understanding, being willing to have more of a growth mindset where you're saying okay this is what my natural capacities are currently, but this is something I can train. This is something I can improve and by really putting in the time and understanding how other people approach this when they have difficulties. Asking other students at school, asking your academic advisors, saying where can I get tutoring? How do I do this better and spend my time more wisely in approaching this material because it's sucking up six hours of my day and I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. How do I do this better? Realizing that that's something that you're going to have to do and you don't improve if you don't put in the work.