The Systemic Nature of Metacognitive Experiences

Abstract

Metacognitive experiences comprise metacognitive feelings and metacognitive judgments or estimates evoked during a cognitive endeavour. The emphasis of this chapter is on the interrelations between metacognitive experiences and particularly between feeling of familiarity (FOF), feeling of difficulty (FOD), feeling of confidence (FOC) and feeling of satisfaction (FOS) in different phases of cognitive processing (i.e., in advance, during, and after task processing). It was assumed that these metacognitive feelings are products of inferential processes that make use of specific cues which are related to fluency or interruption of cognitive processing. Therefore, they are interrelated and form systems, in which the change of one metacognitive experience will influence the state of the others. Specifically, FOC was expected to be related to FOF, FOD, and estimated solution correctness (ESC), whereas FOS to FOC and ESC. These assumptions were tested in a study in which 274 students of 7th and 9th grade participated. They were required to solve two mathematical tasks, varying in their processing demands (task difficulty), and to rate on 4-point scales the above metacognitive experiences in three phases of problem solving. The results confirmed the systemic nature of the above metacognitive experiences, regardless of task difficulty. The phase of processing, however, did differentiate the relations between the metacognitive experiences studied. These findings explain various findings related to FOC and pose questions regarding the nature of metacognitive experiences.