A meta note concerning writing a textbook on developmental
psychology versus writing a monograph or an article or a note
on XMCA. There are very serious genre constraints on writing a
text. The production of such a book takes a long time (7 years
for the first edition in the case of cole and cole) and costs
the publishers a ton. Ecumenicalism is one result. I have written
a monograph on why culture is so thoroughly absent from mainstream
psychology and all those reasons apply heavily to what is considered
essential material that has to be included in a text on the topic
we are writing on. Add to that our own intellectual shortcomings
and the breadth of material covered, and problems result, no matter
what.
A more local meta comment. Whole sections of the book are meant
to be read as a wholes. In this case, the "whole" is a (disputed)
category called "middle childhood" so the chapter on schooling
inevitably has to be treated along with the two chapters that
accompany it. The section intro which I did not post (because it
preceeds chapter 12 not chap 13!) lays out the more general frame.
I will try to post that section intro.
These comments are very relevant to the fully justified
criticism that the chapter focuses on cognitive development and
schooling at the expense of the social aspects of schooling. I
personally view them as intricately and mutually constituitive.
Prose has this nasty linear quality to it.
Now, about metacognition.
(And, following my own ethnic tradition, to start with a question):
What uses of "meta" might be unproblematic in the study of
development, or human behavior more generally?
Is metalinguistic free of the problems of meta-cognition? (usually
defined as conscious access to one's own mental activity, or
the ability to think about one's thought processes). How about
meta-memory, another widely used term in trhe developmental literature.
Somehow it seems to me that metaCOGNITION is especially problematic
because it presupposes that there are thought processes to be
accessed in some privileged way as a couple of you wrote. But there
are cultures where there is little or no talk about thought processes
at all and a lot of controversy about whether any such categories
exist in the language for doing so. This comes up in recent
discussions of the development of theory of mind " " in the 3-5year
old age range.
Some recent research suggests that adults from some cultures
aksed to deal with standard false-belief tasks fail to make correct
predictions about someone's behavior based on what we would refer
to as "beliefs" or "thought processes."
This question is relevant to conclusions about the cognitive
consequences of schooling in a big way. In 1971 (damn, I remember
1971!) Sylvia Scribern and I wrote an article in Science on the
cognitive consequences of schooling where we struggled to understand
school/non-school differences in tested performance on memory,
problem solving, etc tasks modelled on experimental psychological
procedures from the US. It appeared at the time that schooling
produced a form of learning to learn about classes of tasks that
included the ability to say something that sounded reasonable about
the basis for what one had just done.
Subsequently we spent a lot of time worrying about whee those
tasks came from, why school-like tasks were given a privileged
status regarding "cognitive processes," etc. This included research
on literacy among the Vai concerning the extent and sense in which
involvement in literacy-related activities was related to being able
to talk about language, e.g., the "effect of literacy on the development
of metalinguistic skills."
I'll post some more on metacognition per se soonish. But in the meantime,
I'll stop with the question. Is the term, metacognition, more
problematic than the terms metalinguistic or metamemory? Should
all be taken as forms of discourse whose meaning derives solely
from their position in that discourse? Or are they differentially
problematic?
mike