re: #190 reine.de.tout

Agree with you, based on nothing more than my observations of people over the years.

And a person’s self-discipline is part of general culture, and family culture.

My belief, which has been borne out by a lot of research, is that meta-cognition is a very important variable that influences one’s academic performance. Essentially, it means self-knowledge, or knowledge about the process by which you learn; it comprises the executive functions of the process - knowledge of what enables you as an individual to learn well, knowledge of what strategies you can use to learn, the ability to evaluate your own learning and to adopt new strategies to compensate for weaknesses and take advantage of strengths.

My overall focus as an educator is to help students become more meta-cognitive in their learning processes. It is amazing how much of the underlying structures of our educational system actually work to undermine a student’s meta-cognitive processes. For example, the very notion of how students get evaluated, where they pass over the responsibility of evaluation to their teachers - essentially looking at evaluation as a black box; they submit work and it gets evaluated in some invisible process and then returned.