Metacognition About Memory
Metacognition about memory, sometimes called metamemory, refers to the self-monitoring and self-control of one's own memory in the acquisition and retrieval of information. It is a relatively new topic, having been investigated by psychologists for approximately forty years. Before then, researchers viewed learners as passive, as blank slates onto which new ideas were etched through repetition. By contrast, subsequent researchers viewed the learner as an active controller of his or her learning, whether acquiring new or retrieving old information. Moreover, researchers now know that people can monitor their progress during both learning and retrieval.
For example, imagine a student who is studying for an examination that will occur tomorrow in French class, say on French-English vocabulary such as " chateau/castle" and " rouge/red." Let us keep that student in mind as we consider the monitoring and the control of the student's learning of the new vocabulary and his or her attempts to retrieve the answers during the test the next day.
A theoretical framework that integrates all of these processes into an overall system can be found in Nelson and Narens (1990).
Different kinds of monitoring processes can be distinguished in terms of when they occur in the learning/retrieval sequence and whether they pertain to the person's future performance (in which case the focus is said to be on prospective monitoring) or to the person's past performance (in which case the focus is said to be on retrospective monitoring).
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