Self-directed learning and meta-cognition

I had a thought tonight about self-directed learning (SDL) and meta-cognition. It seems that if you think of SDL as a method that it could be termed as being meta-cognition. Since meta-cognition is someone recognizing how they learn, what motivates them to learn, and how to apply that to any situation, SDL as a method fits that perfectly for me. I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this.

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robmba said…
Check out Hase's "From Andragogy to Heutagogy" for some additional articles on the topic of SDL.

http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/Articles/dec00/hase2.htm

Van Merrienboer also talks about SDL in one chapter of his "Ten Steps to Complex Learning" as part of his discussion of his 4C/ID model. Part of that discussion is about assessment. If you're self directing your learning, well, assessment is part of the learning process. Just because someone else isn't "teaching" you doesn't mean you don't have to be assessed. If you're teaching yourself, you have to assess yourself. And guess what, when you assess yourself, you're finding out what you do and don't know, which is metacognition.

Lorin Anderson's "A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing" (Revised Bloom's Taxonomy) talks a lot about metacognition as an important level to attain in learning. He points out that included in metacognition are understanding one's own capabilities, one's goals, one's interest in a topic, and judgments about the utility value of a topic. Those are all pretty important in self directed learning. You're not going to just go decide to learn something if it's not important/interesting to you.

I don't know if I'd say that SDL in and of itself is metacognition, but that the two are inextricably intertwined. There are people who learn things on their own without even realizing it, but if anyone really is specifically searching out to learn something on their own for a reason, there's metacognition involved.
8:35 PM
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