To be successful, college students need to do a lot of learning on their own, and such self-regulated learning involves monitoring going progress toward a learning goal and making decisions about how to learn the more difficult concepts and materials. Students do rely on these metacognitive processes to guide their learning, but inaccurate monitoring can lead students to make poor study decisions that will ultimately undermine their performance. Accordingly, I’ll discuss the pitfalls of using metacognition to support self-regulated learning, and as important, I’ll describe some techniques that show promise for improving students’ metacognition and achievement.
Dr. John Dunlosky is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and the director of the Science of Learning and Education Center at Kent State University, where he has taught since 2004. He has contributed empirical and theoretical work on metacognition and self-regulated learning, and his current research focus is on discovering techniques that will improve students’ learning and achievement across the lifespan. Dr. Dunlosky is a member of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a founder of the International Association for Metacognition, and co-authored Metacognition, the first textbook on the topic.
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