DEFINITIONS:

• Cognition: to think, reason, know, believe, perceive — a mental process
• Metacognition: thinking about your thinking
  • what you think you know about what you know
  • having an awareness of your mental process: ability to consider how and why you think what you do
  • not complete/perfect understanding or control over your thoughts; but effort and self-reflection (attempt to unpack and trace origins of your thoughts or recognize what you don’t know)
  • 3 categories of meta-knowing: metacognition, meta-strategic knowledge, epistemology

Knowledge isn't just facts (it's a wider, connected process)

• Metastrategic knowledge: strategy selection process to do tasks
  • the ability to draw on and utilize specific strategies to achieve goals (ie. “I choose this approach because…”)
• Epistemology: orientation toward the nature of knowledge
  • not just “what is truth to me?” but also “what does truth look like to me” and “how do i measure it?”
  • influences metacognitive and metastrategic knowledge; shapes how we talk about education/testing/standardized testing/nature of school/purpose of school
• Thoughts rarely operate in isolation; Schemas emerge from socialization
• How you feel shapes how you think; how you think shapes how you feel — is separation an arbitrary distinction?
• To know: encompasses beliefs, emotions, perceptions (inseparable)

Why isn’t there more critical thinking?

• Teach to the tests (have to get through certain material)
• Curricula restrictions (time restrictions)
• Standardized systems means less room for individualism

QUESTIONS TO PONDER:

Is school even an institution set up for critical thinking?

What is the value of school? Why are you here?

What do you gain from being at NU or any other school?