Metacognitive Knowledge: a person's knowledge and awareness of cognitive processes.
Cognitive Self-Regulation: skill at identifying goals, selecting effective strategies, and accurate monitoring
The sections in this week's material about reading and writing, and the process of acquiring these skills, described a process of skill acquisition and adaptation that is present right from the very beginning of learning. There's a process of "learning how to learn," selecting the learning strategy most appropriate to the situation. What struck me the most was the process of reading. A few techniques are given:
- sounding out a word - common in beginning readers, encountering unfamiliar words
- direct retrieval from long-term memory
- letter-context - shortcutting some of the retrieval process by knowing that how a word starts restricts how it ends
- sentence-context - again, a shortcut of retrieval, using sentence context to limit the possible range of words that comes next
And children are able to incorporate their growing understanding of the world into their reading skill. Words mean things, and as children get a greater breadth of knowledge they can immediately apply that to understanding written words.
The skill of writing progresses as children learn how to organize thought; early writing uses a knowledge-telling strategy, where the child relays information in whatever order it tumbles out of their memory. As their memory retrieval becomes more sophisticated, they are able to organize their thoughts in a way that conveys the important points, a knowledge-transforming strategy.
I really like the image that metacognition evokes - a child in control of their own learning.
I thought this whole section was interesting to read also. The way the human mind works is amazing! I also really liked the "Knowledge-Telling Strategy" because it makes sense that younger children would just write what they deem as important in their papers and leave out any extras they don't feel are necessary, or don't know to add in their writing. You did an excellent job summing this all up! Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteI read this section a couple of times because my son who is 6 suffers from speech problems he is not able to pronounce a lot of letters and he leaves a lot of letters out when speaking in sentences. This could result in education and reading problems when he reaches kindergarten and 1st grade. He will need extra help this was also interesting to see the way that people begin to learn and develop their sense of letters and reading and how it all connects.
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