Attention and Metacognition

When I wrote Net Smart about social media literacies, I started with attention because it is the foundation of thinking and communication, because our mobile devices and social media are increasingly designed to attract and distract our attention, and because my students at Berkeley and Stanford were ineluctably drawn to their laptops during class. I used this quote as the epigraph to my chapter on attention because I believe that the most important issue is that we can and desperately need to educate our attention -- something both science and contemplative traditions assure us is doable.

In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next. The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms. Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis. Perhaps, like the memorable image captured in 600 BCE of a Sumerian scribe patiently transcribing cuneiform beside an Akkadian scribe, we will be able to preserve the capacities of two systems and appreciate why both are precious.

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) p 228

Paying attention to attention and directing the focus of attention on one's own thinking is known as "metacognition." Recent neuroscientific and educational research supports the notion that students (and all learners) learn more effectively when they not only think about how they are thinking, but also understand which kind of thinking and attention to deploy in different situations. Here are some good links to get started.

I wrote this for an educational publication about attention and other social media literacies:

Multitasking, or “continuous partial attention” as Linda Stone has called another form of attention-splitting, or “hyper attention” as N. Katherine Hayles has called another contemporary variant, are not necessarily bad alternatives to focused attention. It depends on what is happening in our own external and internal worlds at the moment. If we don’t know enough to turn around when we hear a bicycle or automobile horn, we’re not going to survive long. Clearly we have different forms of attention that are appropriate for different ways of doing things. Sometimes we need to “turn on all the lights” in order to be aware of as much as possible. Sometimes we need to be vigilant to information outside our focal area, and at other times we need to block out distractions and narrow our attention to a spotlight.

This is an excellent resource for understanding the role of metacognition in learning:

Metacognitive practices increase students’ abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991).  They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter: they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts.  When Pintrich (2002) asserts that “Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them” (p. 222), notice the students must “know about” these strategies, not just practice them.  As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a “conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]” (p. 179).

Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc.  A key element is recognizing the limit of one’s knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to “actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67).

Recently, ex-Googler Tristan Harris caused a stir at Google and the Twittersphere when his TED talk and Atlantic article detailed the ways in which the kind of actions that makes slot machines so addictive is being engineered into apps -- because capturing attention and selling it to advertisers is the Web's dominant business model:

 "While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us."