Exam Study Expert: ace your exams with the science of learning

215. Metacognition Toolkit: Ace Your Learning – with Nathan Burns

• William Wadsworth • Episode 215

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 37:33

What is metacognition? And how can you use it to plan smarter, reflect on exams and evaluate your daily learning with clarity?

We’re joined by Nathan Burns, aka Mr Metacognition, to explore his favourite stackable metacognitive learning strategies that will have you reflecting on and improving your studying at home and in the classroom – from this moment, right through exam season and beyond. 

Discover how to think metacognitively about:

  • answering questions carefully
  • pre-exam season revision as a whole
  • post-exam and post-mock reflections
  • monitoring how your learning is going

👇 Your post-listening task: leave a comment and tell us which strategy you want to implement – or use already! 

** 

⭐ About today’s guest, Nathan Burns: 

Nathan Burns (aka Mr Metacognition) is an author, educator and expert on metacognition, who offers comprehensive metacognitive training programmes in schools across the UK.

🌐 Discover more: https://www.mrmetacognition.com/home

**

🎓 About Exam Study Expert: 

Hosted by William Wadsworth, memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills coach. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress. 

🎯 Book 1:1 COACHING to supercharge your exam success: https://examstudyexpert.com/workwithme/ 

📘 Get Outsmart Your Exams, my award-winning exam technique book: https://geni.us/exams * 


** 

Podcast edited by Kerri Edinburgh.

* As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases on suggested books.

Questions? Comments? Requests? Or just want to say "thanks" - send me a text message (I read them all!).

What Metacognition Really Means

William Wadsworth

Metacognition is an awareness of our own thought processes and the understanding of the patterns behind them. It's thinking about thinking, and it's widely recognized as a very powerful set of tools we can use to be better scholars and learners, with a really impressive weight of evidence for the progress we can make in our studies when we start to get good at the tools of metacognition. This is our topic for today's episode here on the Exam Study Expert podcast. Thank you for joining us. There are simple examples of metacognition that I'm sure many of us instinctively use as part of our studying, even if we don't know the fancy label for it. You know, for example, awareness of the topics that we're weaker in and prioritizing our study efforts accordingly. I think we'd all agree that it's important to prioritize your time on the weaker areas for your exams, and I think that's something many of us do, and of course that's a very, very useful strategy when we use it. But most of us, I think, really are really kind of scratching the surface of what metacognition can do for us to help us learn smarter and succeed in our academic goals. To help us learn more, I'm delighted to be joined today by metacognition specialist, the author and speaker Nathan Burns. I asked Nathan to start by expanding on just exactly what it is we mean by metacognition.

Flavell’s Definition In Real Life

Growth Mindset And Metacognitive Action

Nathan Burns

Oh, you've gone straight in with the biggest question now. That's the one I try and kick down the track as far as I possibly can. Or how do I define it? The definition that I always use, and I I will take a little bit of time to explain this, is one from a theorist called John Flavelle, from about 50 years ago now, actually, but but still one of the definitions that I like more than anything else. So Flavelle says that you're being metacognitive if you notice that you're having more trouble learning A than B, or if it strikes you that you should double check C before accepting it as fact. Now, quite a wordy definition, I appreciate. So what does that actually mean? I think this is best if I if I share with you a bit of an anecdote. Imagine that we've got a couple of students and they've both just done a test, whether it's uh you know a bit of a math test, a bit of an English test, whatever it is, and imagine that it was out of 10 marks. You'd get some students, right? And and some people will be listening and they'd get zero out of ten, they'd go, Oh, it doesn't matter, oh I didn't bother, I didn't try next time, next time I'll I'll I'll do loads better, I'm gonna be amazing next time. Or you score ten out of ten, you go, right, I'm amazing, I'm brilliant, I've cracked this subject, don't need to worry about it again. Brilliant. Basically, neither of those reactions are being metacognitive. If we go on Flavelle's definition, it's the I'm having more trouble learning A than B. So that's where if you as a student scored zero out of ten, you go, right, well, I obviously didn't want to score zero. That's not the score I was after. However, are there any small little things that I could do to maybe get one or two marks? Are there a couple of things that maybe I forgot to revise and maybe that would have got me another couple of marks? Like, are there small little bits, or what are those small little bits that would allow me to get a little bit better? Or maybe you get zero out of ten, you go, actually, the revision approach that I used wasn't wasn't good, the formatting of my answers wasn't great, that you know, this wasn't good, this wasn't good, I'm going to start again from scratch. That would be that individual being metacognitive, considering how they prepared, how they did, and what they're going to do the same or what they're going to do differently the time after. That student who got 10 out of 10, for example, it's very easy. We get full marks, it's very easy to say, right, I'm brilliant, I'm absolutely fantastic, don't need to worry about this again. But actually, scoring 10 out of 10 is as much a time to worry and think about the future as any other mark. Because you need to consider, well, why did I get 10 out of 10? What is it that I did in my preparation that allowed me to recall all that knowledge? How is it that I laid out my work? How did I communicate those answers to the teacher? How did I ensure that I was putting them in the format? How did I make sure that I understood the questions which were actually being asked? So, you know, how do I know or what can I do to prepare so that next time I get 10 out of 10 again? And 10 out of 10 the time after. I think for me it's very much understanding that the outcome is important, but it's the process that got you there. And that process, both the planning of it and the monitoring of it and the evaluation of it, is this idea of metacognition. In the second half of um Flavelle's definition, he says, um, I double check C before accepting it as fact. And I'd say that that's maybe never been more important in a world of TikTok and flicking through videos and information overload and AI doing this, that, and the other. I mean, it wasn't long ago you could easily tell an AI video from a non-AI video is it was it was obvious every every human would have seven arms and four heads. Whereas now, there are very, very high-quality videos where you do sort of have to stop and go, ooh, actually, is is that real? You know, it is is is that something that's true? Um so this ability to double check information before accepting it as fact. So maybe from an academic point of view, if we go back to those 10 quick questions, if I gave you now uh those questions and the first nine were all positive answers and they were all whole numbers if we were doing a quick math test, if you then got a negative decimal as your tenth answer, you'd you'd you'd be questioning yourself. You'd go, right, that doesn't follow the pattern. That's not what I expected to see. So anything out of the ordinary, anything that doesn't follow the pattern, anything that doesn't follow the model, the double checking of that information before you accept it as fact, as Flavelle likes to say, that is this idea of being metacognitive.

William Wadsworth

So a couple of things that I wanted to pick up on. One of the things that struck me when you were describing, you know, almost sort of metacognition as like a process, and you were talking about that student that uh had got got the 10 out of 10 and done very well and thinking about what could I have done even better? How can I, you know, what what was the process that led to that success? How can I kind of replicate the good things, continue to build on that? There's quite an interesting link, I think, between metacognition and growth mindset, because you know, growth mindset would tell us, you know, we can continue to improve and grow, you know, whether we're doing really great at the moment, you know, that's you know, we can continue to grow beyond that, or even if you know, we got the two out of ten and we didn't go very well, okay. Well, what can we do about that? What can we do next time? There's sort of quite an interesting parallel, I think, between sort of the metacognitive strategies, which is sort of maybe a little bit more practical, what you actually do, what you actually think about, and the growth mindset, which is kind of more like an attitudes mindset thing.

Nathan Burns

And I think, you know, if if you have those strategies, but without the belief that you can get better and without the understanding that hard, focused, and efficient work will lead to improvements, then those metacognitive strategies probably don't matter much. So if you dive into the theory um quite deeply, you come across different types of metacognitive learners. So there's some work about sort of like the different stages you can be at. And one of those types of learners is an aware metacognitive learner. So they know that they could reflect on their planning. They know that they could reread their work, they could redraft it, they could go to a textbook, they could double-check some information before accepting it as fact, whatever it might be. But those aware learners, they know these things, but they won't necessarily go off and do it. And sometimes that's maybe because they're quite passive, or maybe that's because of that idea almost of growth mindset of believing that it isn't going to make a difference. In fact, a couple of years ago, I did some work around the metacognition of writing. And the very first thing that that came out of that in some of the reading that I was doing and a colleague I was working with was actually the the key thing is that students need to understand that they can improve, that they are able to reflect on their writing and reread it and redraft it and plan it, and all of these things will make their writing better. That this isn't a fixed skill, that it is something that they can, that they can work on. Because often I I mean, I come from a maths background and it's something historically linked in with maths. That, oh, I'm not very good at maths, I can't do it, I never could, my parents can't, and they said not to worry about, but you know, duh duh. Like that's something that that culturally is linked to maths. But actually, the more I've sort of reflected on out of subject, I feel like students almost think of that in in a lot of different areas. I know for me, I often go, oh, you know, actually I think I I quite struggle when it gets to history, I struggle with the criticality, you know, maybe I just can't do it. And here I am as an academic many, many years later, you know, it is it is possible. But I think actually that mindset like you allude to is really, really important. If we can't visualize the improvements we want, and if we don't have the motivation or the belief that we can improve, then actually a lot of these strategies and skills are are less important if we're not going to do them and we're not going to believe in them. So yeah, a huge, a huge crossover between those ideas.

William Wadsworth

For those that should probably just be explicit, if you've not come across the idea of growth mindset before, probably got a sense of it by now, but it's that idea that, you know, I I tend to like to think of it as being um, you know, the belief that you can improve and and your abilities are not fixed. You know, even if you're finding something hard today, you can get better at it with the right kind of practice and training over time. So this is very interesting, this idea of the aware learner. Perhaps we could hear the rest of the set. So talk us through what the different kinds of metacognitive learners are.

Four Types Of Metacognitive Learners

Nathan Burns

Yes. So we start with sort of like a tacit metacognitive individual. And and all these levels come from the work of Perkins, 1982. There are a lot of different scales and measures of metacognition. And I'll be honest, most are unhelpful if I'm being polite. They're just very lengthy, long, long measures that don't really help us understand them. But I think having four categories of learners helps us as learners and helps staff that we're working with. So, yeah, a tacit learner is our first metacognitive individual. And in essence, they're just not aware of the processes that they're going through. Maybe you're copying things down from the board. Maybe you can do some basic questions where the numbers change a bit or the phrases change a little bit, but actually just getting through the cognition that the stuff, I call it, the knowledge and the skills, just getting through that is sufficient. You're not actively taking the time to consider or not just not actively taking the time to consider, don't have the skills to evaluate and plan out that work. So often sort of the metacognitive skills, the ability to plan, the ability to monitor how that work is going, the ability to evaluate, like in those um anecdotes of the zero out of ten or the ten out of ten, those skills and abilities either just aren't there or the student just hasn't got to the point of using them. The aware learner, obviously, we discussed, and this is where the learner does have that knowledge, and the learner does know about things they should be doing. Examples of this might be, oh, I know I should plan out my work. I know I should write down all of the all of the information in bullet points before I respond to that really large essay. I know that I should identify the topics I really need to revise on before jumping into revision. It might be things like, oh, actually, let me evaluate my work. How can I improve? What strategy did work? What strategy will I use next time? So a lot of those things, those are ideas that the learner will be aware of, but they're not acting upon them. So they know that they could and they should be doing these things, but the aware learner won't be, won't be pushing themselves forward. We then get up to um the next couple of types of learners. So we've got the strategic learner followed by the reflective learner. And there's very little difference between them apart from the reflective learner will also do the monitoring. So the strategic learner will plan out their work and they will evaluate it, and then that reflective learner will do the monitoring bit in the middle. And in essence, that means that they're basically activating all of those things that the aware learner knew that they could do, but they weren't doing. And they've probably got a few more skills because they're used to practicing them. They're probably stronger at planning because they're used to doing it, they're probably better at evaluating more critically and designing future plans again because they're more familiar with those ideas. But yeah, in essence, as we move along, we go from an individual who doesn't know of those skills to an individual who is but isn't acting upon them, to an individual who is acting upon most of them, to an individual who is. And the the the primary point of that final reflective learner is this idea of monitoring, because this is one of the most complicated things, arguably, in metacognition.

Planning Framework: Task, Self, Strategy

William Wadsworth

You're actually monitoring what you're doing as you're doing it, whereas evaluation comes after you've finished the task. Yeah, and I can see that that would be uh that would be a harder one to incorporate. So you mentioned a couple of times uh this sort of trilogy of the planning, thinking about how you can approach the task, the monitoring, thinking about how the task is going as you're doing it, and then evaluation, how did it go after the fact. So kind of thinking about some of the metacognitive strategies that may be very familiar to a lot of listeners, albeit perhaps you didn't know it was a metacognitive strategy. Uh I mean, one thing I see a lot of people doing and very widely taught, very widely suggested as a strategy, is just simply categorizing what you need to learn, your different topic areas, perhaps with a simple traffic light system. So red are your weaker topics, amber for kind of mid-topics, green for the ones you're already quite good at. And then we can prioritize our work accordingly. We'll start with the red topics, the ones that you're weakest today, uh, and give them more time and energy. What are some of the other ways we can apply metacognition, especially when it comes to planning our, you know, our test prep, our revision ahead of a big set of exams?

Graphic Organisers That Drive Depth

Nathan Burns

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the strategies that that I like the most is around longer written work, longer form questions. So as opposed to the prep, almost prepping for those questions themselves. So depending obviously on what you're studying, but a lot of us will be we'll be studying subjects where there's a there's a 10-mark question, an eight-mark question, a 20-marker, a 30 marker, 40 marker. Now, we've used that word planning a lot, but actually I think it's something that we would use quite often as professionals, and I think arguably we wouldn't be able to provide a really super clear definition as to what it means to plan, let alone for our learners. And that's where this first idea actually comes in. So this idea of planning, to me, is knowledge of task, knowledge of self, and knowledge of strategies. So what that means is knowledge of task is having an accurate understanding of what it is you're supposed to be doing. Knowledge of self is then choosing the information which is relevant for that question. So a topic might come up, say waterfalls. You could list everything that you know about waterfalls, but if you're being asked about one specific waterfall in the question, then a lot of that information isn't going to be relevant or it's not going to help you build up towards the marks that you are trying to get. So that is knowledge of self, choosing out the appropriate information for the given question. And then finally is knowledge of strategy. So given that I know accurately what I've got to do and what information I need to include, what is the very best way of going about it? And so, based upon that information, I developed a really short, easy-to-use planning template, simply three columns titled Knowledge of Task, Knowledge of Self, Knowledge of Strategies. Equally, it could be called What Do I Have to Do? What information do I need to include? How can I do it? We can easily change that language, and it doesn't change the meaning. And that becomes an incredibly powerful planning template regardless of the subject in that you're working. So I came from a maths background. It works just as well in maths as it does a history, works just as well in a biology question as it would do a drama performance, because it allows you to deconstruct the question at hand, draw down on the knowledge that you actually do need to include, and then actively consider the strategies that you have to deploy that information. So once we've identified the information or the topics that we want to revise, that's a really good way of developing our understanding of a range of different questions and really making sure that our skills are up to scratch before we, you know, sit an exam or do a piece of coursework. So that's a bit more of a focused exam prep or question prep type question. One of the other things I love to use is an idea of a graphic organizer. So sometimes known as a mind map spider diagram. Uh for the older listeners, that's might might be known as, in effect, graphic organizers are visual tools. There are typically 10 different graphic organizers that are used, but graphic organizers, in effect, provide a visual way of planning out your response to something. So it could be used as a bit of a brain dump to put a topic in the middle of a bubble map and then to write down all of the information that relates to the topic in the middle. Or you might use something like a multi-flow map, and that is a cause and effect graphic organizer where the causes feed into the event in the middle, go out to the effects of that event. So again, different organizers doing different things, whether they are used to focus in on specific questions, to plan out the responses there, or whether they're actually used to plan out the wider revision. They have incredibly powerful tools at providing a visual element that is helpful as opposed to a visual element for visual element's sake. So it's very, very easy to do, to make posters or to produce mind maps or whatever it might be. And they're very visual, they're very bright, they're very big, they're very colourful, but there's there's there's a lack of efficiency and deep thinking within those, whereas a graphic organizer brings that visual aspect without reducing sort of the deeper thinking aspects of it.

William Wadsworth

Putting myself in the learner's shoes at the start of revision season. So it's kind of start of February of term, start of the Easter holidays. How do we use Metacog strategies to kind of plan our plan our approach for you know weeks and months to come across multiple subjects? So that one I mentioned with the traffic lights, that's kind of the extent of most people's knowledge on what they could do there. Is there anything else that would be relevant to answer that question?

Calibrating With RAG, Diaries, Prediction

Nathan Burns

So, yeah, traffic light system, absolutely one that uh that a lot of people will be familiar with. Now, the one thing that I always urge students to look at is how they can calibrate an accurate understanding of what it is they do know and what it is they don't know. And that's basically a very, very complicated way of saying make sure that you are revising the things that really, really matter. So, for example, with a traffic light system, I always would say to a student, right, once you've used a rag rating, red, amber green, whatever you want to call it, check it where possible with an expert. Speak to your teacher about it, make sure that that is aligning with what they see as an expert, the things that you need to improve. Because we've got to remember, you as a student, you can be doing really, really well, but you haven't had the years' experience that a teacher has looking at the MARC schemes, having a look at the examiner's reports. You won't have as much awareness of all the exam papers and the variety of questions. So something like checking the right rating of a teacher is really powerful. Above and beyond that, calibrating that understanding is really important. So one way in which that can be done is through a learning diary. So it's something that a lot of teachers might already be using within their own practice, or you might be in a context where that's already being used. But a learning diary, in effect, is a way for you to record down in live time the areas that you are doing well on and the areas that you are struggling on a little bit more. So imagine now that you're in um a set of history lessons, and there is a lesson around the early Roman Empire, at the end of that lesson you might note down, right, I do know this piece of information, I do know this piece of information, but this is something I'm struggling on. When you then go to revisit that four months later, if you hadn't have made that note, you're not going to have an accurate understanding of what it is you you were thriving on and what it is you were struggling on. So by keeping that record at the end of each lesson, at the end of each week, it allows you to improve the accuracy of what it is you don't know and what it is you do know. Above and beyond that, what I'd always urge learners to do as well is to do some level of prediction with work that they know is going to be marked. Again, this is all about calibrating how effective you are at determining how good you are at certain things versus an expert. So if you've just written an assignment for homework, a 20-mark question, then make some notes on the bottom of it or keep notes in a diary or on your phone of what mark you expect to get, why you expect to get that mark, and what areas you think might be pointed out to improve on. Because what you really want is for the expert, the teacher, the lecturer, whoever it might be, to say exactly the same thing because then you're well calibrated. If you think that you're getting 20 out of 20 on a history assignment, but then you get 10 out of 20, it was very easy to not hold yourself to account and you go, oh, I knew I was only going to get 10 out of 20. Next time I'll do a lot better. So it's also this idea of being able to hold yourself to account of, well, this in the moment is what I think I'm going to get, this is why, and these are the areas for improvement and you want those to align. It's the same in mock exams. What I'd always tell my students to do is once they've finished a paper, go back through the paper and in their head, mark that paper. Because then by marking it, you will automatically be identifying the things that you are struggling with. You're probably not going to be able to rectify them then and there because otherwise you'd have done it in the first instance. But if when you're in the exam, you go, right, actually, this question I know I've really struggled on, and maybe it turns out that you did do really well on it. But by keeping a mental note of that and then scribbling it down or typing into your phone when you're out of the exam, you can go back to that and see, right, well, actually I thought I struggled on it, but I actually did really well. Why did I think I struggled? Or you can go, well, I thought I struggled on it, and it transpires I did struggle on it. And so this is something that I want to add to my learning diary.

Soft Touch Reflections And Vibe

William Wadsworth

So many great ideas there, Nathan. I think, you know, I really like that idea of self-prediction. Uh, I mean, in the mock exam, time permitting, of course. But 100% like for especially for those, you know, you're doing that kind of long form-written assignment, you know, uh at home. And and and you know, I think most of our listeners will have access to either a teacher or maybe at university it's it's it's your tutor. And, you know, even if it's relatively few assignments of that nature that you're preparing, you know, in some university context it might just be like a handful of those kind of papers per year. But such a useful idea to self predict how you've scored on on them and then compare that to, you know, that that thing you're really looking for. I think, you know, pay particular attention to to the why, you know, if you if there was a discrepancy, if there's a delta between your prediction and what they said, you know. Why was that? Let's dig into that and find out that. Because that's going to be a super valuable lesson to learn. Love that idea. I think that's great. In terms of the learning diary, I think that's a really nice idea. You know, as you're going through your learning experiences, you're going through your course, you know, after each day, you know, thinking about, okay, you know, what was what was good from that lesson? Was that easy? Was that hard? You know, was there anything in particular I struggled with? You know, I think as much as anything, there's a nice kind of almost like attitude benefit to just like writing down, okay, like I found that hard, but like you just write that down and just get it out of your head and you know, make it, you know, be kind of honest with yourself, be real with yourself. And, you know, it plays quite nicely with some of the other things we talked about on the podcast before. So episode 196, for example, we talked about daily gratitude journaling as a habit. Uh episode 23, for example, memory journaling. You know, I know that's really popular in many of the schools I teach in. Um, you know, some idea of some kind of daily activity where you're at the end of the day kind of writing down something, you know, doing some kind of reflective exercise from the day. You know, you could easily bolt your learning diary kind of notes onto that, sort of stuff the habit onto something you're already doing if you're already doing one of those kind of things. Just have a little bit of that metacognitive reflection on on how the how the new content from that day was was going for you. I think that's a really nice, nice thought. In terms of kind of reflecting on exams, I think it's it's a really good thing to talk about. I came across a student down in Australia recently, and they were, you know, very, very able student. They were one of the top students of their school, it's a very academic school, and that they were kind of recording all the exams they'd done and the mark they'd got for them. And they also had a column in their spreadsheet, a very organized student, um, you know, and they also had a column they'd just titled Vibe next to each exam paper they'd practiced. Yeah. And they were just writing down kind of like their their vibe. Like, how did it get? Which I thought was just quite a like a nice, chill, kind of like um quite light touch metacognitive bit of reflection. I I quite like that. I thought that was that was nice.

Nathan Burns

It feels very modern, doesn't it, to record Gen Z data. Yeah. But no, like you say, it's it's about these soft touch reflections, and it's it's very easy to get caught up in the the almost all or nothing of right, I'm not at the grade I need, I've not got the score I needed. Well, actually, it's it's a journey, it's a process, however cliche it it sounds. Um so actually to have lots of soft touch points of right, this has gone well, I'm feeling a little bit better about it. Oh, today wasn't as good, actually this has gone better. Those those are all really, really positive little little indicators on that, on that cliched educational journey we're all on.

William Wadsworth

If you wanted to become a little bit more robust, a bit more formalised about kind of your post-exam reflections, whether that's a kind of a formal exam you've sat at your school or college, or whether that's you know just a practice paper you were taking uh you know at home by yourself. The exam wrapper strategy has become quite popular since since uh you and I were at school. I think that's that's sort of sort of a newer idea that's that's that's really had a lot of traction recently. That's something that a lot of teachers will use with their students now. I think it's also a tool the student can use use on their own as well. So if we're not familiar with an exam wrapper, tell us about what that is and and how we use it.

Exam Wrappers For Better Feedback

Nathan Burns

Yeah, absolutely. So an exam wrapper is an opportunity to reflect um more in depth with regards to each question as opposed to almost sort of, you know, right, I've done an assignment, I scored 17 out of 20, okay, good, I'm happy with it. It's past the vibe check, let me move on. What we what we'd want to do with an exam wrapper is take a more detailed evaluation of each question. And the way this works varies, and often you will be limited by the context. So I would argue that the very best way to do an exam wrapper is instantly after the exam or the mock has been done, because again, it allows for that calibration of how well you think you've done in the moment versus the score you end up getting from the from the teacher or the from the tutor once it's been marked. However, obviously, if you're in a context where you're not doing an exam wrapper instantly afterwards, it can still be really, really helpful. So again, taking the time after an exam. I think even just to begin with, to record down your thoughts, it can it can be quite messy. There was one teacher I worked with recently who did something like this where all of her students would come out of the exam. She'd give them all uh an A3 piece of paper and she would just say, Right, write down everything you're feeling. How, you know, emotionally, how are you feeling, which questions did you like, which question, almost sort of like brain dump down all of your feelings and emotions and thoughts and feedback on that paper in the moment as soon as possible. And I think that's probably the key thing with an exam wrapper doing it as in the moment as possible. So if you get the exam paper, you know, you you sit the exam, you get the exam paper back maybe two weeks later, three weeks later, a lot of time has gone since then, and you'll have forgotten maybe how you felt when you're writing a particular answer, or you maybe will gloss over, it's human nature to gloss over, oh, that's a little bit lower than I thought, but that that's fine. We can gloss over some of those things. It's it's how we work. So I think the more immediate you can react to the exam when you walk out, writing down how you feel, the questions you thought you struggled on. It doesn't need to follow a specific template, but your own reflections once you've walked out of the exam and then compare them back to the exam once it's been marked by the expert other, is yet an incredibly powerful tool and and something that that you can do five minutes after each exam doesn't require any prep, doesn't require sort of any any follow-up or great expertise. It is just your your thoughts and feelings put down that you can then reflect on on later versus the marked paper.

William Wadsworth

Yeah, nice. Nice. So we we've we've talked a little bit about some some sort of strategies for for planning and how to sort of think ahead, how you're going to approach things. We talked about some strategies for sort of evaluation. How's it gone, how's it going, like the the learning diary, the the exam wrapper. In terms of evaluation, you you also talk about the the PMI grids, which I which I quite like. What's what's what's that?

Nathan Burns

So a PMI grid, in effect, is just very much like the learning diary, very low stakes and very sort of a high frequency approach to use. You you mentioned um a minute ago about sort of like habits and habit stacking. It's quite nice to have lots of small things that you can just build on as opposed to big ideas that take big habitual changes. So uh a PMI grid, positive minus interesting. In effect, you know, you could use it in conjunction with the learning diary. It might be, it might be separate separately to it. But I quite like the interesting, you know, what what did I enjoy from today's lesson? What did I enjoy from the lecture? What did I enjoy from the topic? Hopefully, hopefully there's lots of things, but at least we're pulling out some things that infused us with the topic. Because sometimes we need that as a way back into the topic. Okay, I'll go back to the thing I found interesting and go from there. But equally, yeah, the the the positive um and the minus, what what went well, what you know, what were you successful on, the minus, what could you improve on, what's the what's the uh the step that you need to take. Next time, it provides a little bit more structure to that reflection. But again, you can easily do a bit of a PMI reflection in in 60 seconds. You could easily do it at the bottom of a page, in a little notebook, on your phone, easily set up a bit of a spreadsheet, whatever it might be, it'd be very, very straightforward to do and to sort of log that all together. And yeah, high frequency, low pressure, again, a nice thing to incorporate.

PMI Grids And Habit Stacking

William Wadsworth

And again, I mean I I was I was sort of alluding to this point earlier, but you know, the more the more we're chatting, the more I'm thinking, you know, I I really like the there's obviously a very sort of strong learning, practical, like directing your future effort strand to all of this. But there's also like I really like the kind of almost emotional side to this as well. You know, just thinking about a student I was talking to yesterday, and she's preparing for a very difficult set of uh exams to be be a uh sort of solicitor certifications. And, you know, she's sort of kind of been going through the first couple of weeks and and, you know, finding it very difficult. And you know, I'm just thinking like for a student that's kind of struggling a little bit, you know, and and and getting, you know, the the sort of sort of emotional distress that comes with that frustration and and and worry and concern and you know, just the act of like writing down, okay, I've just spent a week on this topic, you know, what was positive, you know, what was good, you know, what did I already know? How what did I find easy? What clicked? You know, what were the minuses specifically? Like what was I finding challenging? What was I struggling with? And what's interesting, you know, just just sort of almost like writing that down, just just helps you kind of come out of the slight emotional, just kind of de-escalate the emotional side of it a little bit, just be a little bit more rational, a little bit cool, a bit more subobjective about it. Uh I I really kind of like that that aspect as well. Similarly with the vibe column, I think that was part of why that that student was doing that. It's just like, okay, you know, it wasn't the best day ever on that particular exam, but that's okay. Like I can write that down, I can be objective about it, see it in the round a bit more easily.

Nathan Burns

And this is it, I've I've spent a lot of time thinking about that because it's it's really hard to split all of these ideas of metacognition and objective outcomes versus how we actually feel when we are revising and when we are studying, and there are going to be highs and there are going to be lows, and and actually taking the time to to sort of lean into them and understand how we're feeling, record them down, note them down, and that and then move on rather than just continually trying to ignore them is is yeah, really important. Because there'll be some days where work goes fantastically well, and some days where it doesn't, and that and that is okay, but acknowledging that, noting it down, leaning into it for a bit, being frustrated, and then journaling it, noting it down, putting it in the vibe column and moving on, yeah, it it it it's it's it's good to do. I think it's healthy to do.

William Wadsworth

So we've got some nice strategies for both planning, what we're gonna do, and evaluating how it went. You yourself, I think, Nathan, said that the bit in the middle, the kind of the monitoring as you're actually doing it, is is perhaps the hardest bit of the three to implement. And and I can I can I can well see that. You know, I was taking a look through your your some of your your materials recently, and one strategy I came across was the warning sign strategy. I quite like that. That could be a way to do our monitoring, uh, or kind of one strategy to use to help us do a bit of live monitoring.

Monitoring In The Moment: Warning Signs

Nathan Burns

So, yeah, so so monitoring, as you allude to, it's very, very difficult because our human nature is once we've started something, we like to keep working our way through it and get to the end. And at the end, we might stop and we might pause. But whilst we're in the middle of something, we don't necessarily want to stop. We're we're into a a bit of a flow. We don't want to pause and and consider how we're going. We just want to crack on. Now, what we really need to do, and this is why it's so effective, is to take those pauses, it is to interrupt our thinking and our doing and to go, right, am I am I on track? And that's where this idea of that warning signs came in. So the warning signs is as in effect, or or maybe maybe a teacher, tutor almost producing a list of things that we shouldn't be seeing. So maybe we produce a list of the things that shouldn't occur in in a given paper, you know, make sure or or even the things that that must that absolutely must happen. So make sure that all cases are referenced, make sure that there are four different studies in each question, make sure that you've got 10 qu whatever it might be, the absolute you must, or even if you don't have this, you're not going to get the mark. And it provides almost like a a bit of a checklist, a bit of an uh well monitoring and on you as you go evaluation that as you're going through either specific questions or you're going through exam papers or you're going through the revision process of uh oh, that's happened, that needs to stop, I need to bring myself back. So it could be used in in a number of different ways. Normally when I'm working with students around revision, it's within questions or within exam papers, right? These are the things that that shouldn't be happening. Or actually, let's spin this, these are all the things that you absolutely must have, and you can almost tick them off as you as you go along. So really nice from a metacognitive point of view, but also cognitively from a subject knowledge point of view, actually developing those lists and making yourself aware of the things that you must have in there or you absolutely must not have in there is again really, really good for the revision and the learning process anyway.

William Wadsworth

Amazing. Yeah, no, I like that idea. That's for that thing is very helpful. One of the other things I've sort of come up with over the years, particularly for some of our older listeners who, you know, many of whom have have said to me over the years, you know, a real tendency to kind of go down rabbit holes, you know, I'm reading about something or doing a bunch of practice on something, and then, you know, I realize there's a bit I kind of want to know more about, and I kind of end up chasing this whole rabbit hole and I go down a tangent. You know, one of the things I've suggested, uh, which is which has kind of clicked for it for a lot of students, uh, is is uh keep a tangents list. Yeah so you don't indulge that rabbit hole in the moment. Yeah. You just scribble it down a new tangents list, and then you maybe make time to review that at the end of the week. And when you go back with a bit more distance, you you can sort of often like cross off off the things on there and be like, oh, all right, no, that's not important. Oh, actually, but that is quite important. I'm gonna spend a little bit of time. I'll just tend to spend 10 minutes now. Are there any other nice sort of monitoring strategies you you particularly suggest to people?

Tangents Lists, Post‑Its, Fresh Eyes

Nathan Burns

Well, I think building off that actually the almost the tangents list, I was gonna talk about sort of my uh my post-it note type list. So whenever I'm going through revising, preparing, doing some reading, doing some research, like you say, if there's a point of interest or a study that I really want to read or something that, you know, maybe I'm like, oh, I'm not too sure on that, get it on a post-it note and I actually stick them all around my screen and just all over my desk, but I keep plowing on through the writing I'm doing or oh, you know, whatever the piece of work I'm doing, and then go back and have a look at those sticky notes later on. Or if I'm doing research online, I'll always open up those questions immediately into other tabs, and I'll often try to leave a little bit of time between finishing the first task and going back to them. Because often if we have a look at things with fresh eyes, I think that I'm not quite sure if that's the scientific term for it, but the idea of fresh eyes is when you've almost forgotten what it is you were thinking about when you first looked at it, you go back with fresh eyes. If it still makes sense to you or it still maintains a level of interest, then by all means go and go and read it. Or if you go back to a question you've you've typed out or a sticky note and you look at it and you go, I haven't the foggiest what this means, then in all likelihood, screwing that up and throwing that in the recycling is is almost certainly fine. So yeah, I think this idea of going back to things with fresh eyes, because especially if you've just written something, if you've just written along a question, your mind knows what it is you've tried to be writing down, but you might not have written it down. So that's where this idea comes from. So if you come back to it 24, 48 hours later, fresh eyes, you're not filling in the gaps with your thinking, you're just reading what's out there. And I think that's incredibly powerful on these journeys of right, that's of interest, that's that's something I want to read more about. This is an interesting study. Do I need to know this? Get them all down on post-it notes, get them up in new tabs and go back to them with with fresh eyes a little bit later on. Yeah, really, really helpful.

William Wadsworth

Phenomenal. Nathan, thank you so much for today's conversation. Thank you for sharing so many really, really helpful ideas. It's uh it's been really valuable for people and very grateful for you to for coming on and sharing so many very useful things. So thank you once again. If there are uh if there's anybody that's kind of interested in your work, metacognition generally, um, where would you sign posters to for for further reading, further information?

Nathan Burns

Yeah, so just straight to my website, mrmetacognition.com. Um, or if you just pop it into any good search engine, it'll it'll pop up. And then on there, I do have sort of a page of a lot of articles I've written, and the vast, vast, vast majority are free to access as a good, probably three or four dozen that are free to access. So anything and anything you might want to read about. And on there as well, there are some specific student resources. So again, on the resource tab of the website, there are a couple of resources directed towards students, which again talk about more specific strategies that can be used in the in sort of the nitty-gritty of answering a question or preparing an answer that that as well might be quite helpful.

William Wadsworth

Well, Nathan, thank you so much once again. Uh, and we look forward to talking again soon.

Nathan Burns

Amazing.

Resources And Closing Notes

Speaker

Thank you for having me. Well, that was good, wasn't it? I found myself taking notes. If you need a reminder of anything from today, head to the website for a write up of this episode as well as lots more top notch advice and resources. That's uh examstudyexpert.com. See you next time.