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Reflections on reflection
Learnrng and In.strucrron Vol. 2, pp 59-58, 1992 Printed m Great Britam All rights reserved.
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09594752J92 $15.00 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd
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JOHAN VON WRIGHT University of Helsinki, Finland “The beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows” John Donne (1628)
Abstract The development of reflective processes and the role of self-reflection in learning are examined. Attention is paid to the functions of self-reflection, the relation between self-reflection and reflections about the intentions and beliefs of others, and to methods for studying reflective processes. It is suggested that an analysis of the ‘levels’ of conceptions of psychological processes using the phenomenographic method may clarify the development of metacognitive beliefs. Finally, learning to make use of metacognitive knowledge and the ‘training’ of reflective skills are considered.
Introduction The idea that reflective thinking, and self-reflection especially, is at the centre of educational enterprises both as a goal and as a means is, of course, very old. It was still current in psychology during the early parts of this century, for instance in the cognitive psychology of Binet and James and the educational psychology of Dewey. Then it almost disappeared from the discipline during the era of behaviorism. The attempt to build up a scientific psychology of learning, starting from its beginnings in animal behavior, obscured from view those higher order processes which emerge only at higher levels of systemic organization. At the same time, the active role of the learner and his or her attempts to make sense of the world and to achieve self-direction, were largely explained away; they were considered of doubtful relevance in any attempt to construct a natural science of human behavior. The advent of the ‘cognitive revolution’ in the 1950s and 1960s brought goal-directed behavior back to the centre of the stage. However, the concept of learning was largely lost in the process. This is easy to understand when we look at the ‘model of man’ introduced by computer-analogy, and the emphasis of information processing. The storage of information became a focal problem, and the concept of memory - or
Opening lecture at the Fourth European Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction in Turku, Finland, August 24-28, 1991. Address for correspondence: J. von Wright, Dept. Psychology, University of Helsinki, Fabianinkatu 28, 00100 Helsinki, Finland. 59
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memories - largely displaced that of learning, which was transformed into the problem of describing and modelling (making programs for) efficient information-processing procedures. As Ohlsson (1990) pointed out, the cognitive approach has been concerned with the formation and execution of plans rather than with the shaping of the Image. The swinging back of the pendulum which we have witnessed during the past two decades is partly due to attempts to apply newly-gained insights to problems of instruction. When we study the acquisition of knowledge and skills in the context of education or work rather than in the controlled context of the laboratory, we cannot avoid being confronted with the active nature of human beings who try to make sense of events in terms of their own conceptions of reality. Nor can we avoid the problems involved in understanding intentional action, and the regulation of actions by the actors themselves. Thus we find a resurgence of old ideas in the psychology of learning to-day. These are partly in new guises relating to reflective thinking, self-directed activity, metacognitive knowledge and skills, and so on. However, discussion of these ideas is sometimes clouded by the fact that they are far from simple or unproblematic. Here the concept of self-reflection and its relation to metacognition will be examined.
Two Levels of Reflection There is a famous passage in Bartlett’s book Remembering (1932, p. 301), where he says “[Man] learns how to utilize the constituents of his own ‘schemes’, instead of being determined to action by the ‘schemes’ themselves . . . He finds out how to ‘turn around upon his schemata’ - a reaction literally rendered possible by consciousness, and the one which gives to consciousness its pre-eminent function”. Heavily criticized a few decades ago, the passage today seems suitable as a starting point for a discussion of the notion of ‘levels of reflection’. It seems useful to distinguish between two such levels, and approach this distinction from a currently popular point of view, that of the difference between novices and experts. Any mature adult in our culture qualifies as an expert on reflection; for a novice we may choose a typical child of, say, four years. The 4-year-old novice, then, masters a wide variety of routine events and can, in one sense of the word, reflect on them. Much of her knowledge is structured in terms of temporal-causal sequences: she has formed generalized event and action representations of what is going on in her everyday life. Her collaboration with adults and peers in various activities permits cognitive processes to be displayed, shared, and practised, so that she is able to modify her current mode of functioning. She can understand familiar actions in the sense of interpreting them in a larger context of goals and immediate motives. If we use the prefix ‘meta’ to refer to ‘higher-level’ processes, she can be said to display metacognitive skills. These are most clearly seen in her various self-correcting activities, but what might be called strategic knowledge is also evident in her ability to guess, predict and plan in the context of events which are familiar enough to be ‘understandable’ to her. She can thus use her knowledge of events and the causal texture of the environment for solving problems: she can see that this move rather than that leads to the removal of a current obstacle. That is, in her mind she can compare alternative ways of acting before committing herself to one of them. To sum up, she is capable of reflecting about many features of the world in the sense of considering and
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comparing them in her mind, and of reflecting upon her means of coping in familiar contexts. However, although her actions are often intentional - purposeful and directed towards conscious goals - she is unlikely to be capable of reflecting about herself as the intentional subject of her own actions. A crucial step towards greater expertise in reflection is associated with the development of the concept of self. The most convincing theory of this development seems to be that one acquires the concept of self by being treated as a self by others (Hat&, 1982). In this sense, the self is a social construct. To quote G. H. Mead (1934, p. 225): “Self-consciousness involves the individual’s becoming an object to himself by taking the attitudes of other individuals towards himself within an organized setting of social relationships, and . . . unless the individual had thus become an object to himself he would not be self-conscious or have a self at all.” This view has been developed in various ways. Oatley (1988, p. 378), for instance, suggests that “what we experience as consciousness, the phenomenology of explicit knowing, and knowing that we know, derives from the socially derived experience of the sense of self as director and as part of the comparison processes of consciousness”. Reflecting about one’s own knowledge or intentions involves an element which is absent from reflections about the surrounding world. Self-reflection presupposes, in the language of mental models, a ‘metamodel’: in order to reason about how I reason, I need access to a model of my reasoning performance. The distinction between these two levels of reflection has often been made by developmental psychologists such as Vygotsky, who draws a line between “soznanie” or consciousness in the broad sense, and “osoznanie” or conscious awareness (Wertsch, 1985). Self-reflection implies observing and putting an interpretation on one’s own actions, for instance, considering one’s own intentions and motives as objects of thought. Here, one’s knowledge of oneself is in principle as ‘indirect’ as that of another observer, and may even be less reliable - a person may not always be the best judge of his or her own intentions. For the sake of clarity, this argument may be repeated in other words. My immediate knowledge of my own intention is not based on a reflection about myself, but is an essential ingredient of the intentionality of my behavior (cf. von Wright, 1971). However, when I reflect about my own intention, I step back, as it were, and interpret it, and this interpretation is fallible, like all interpretations. Since the emergence of new functions in the evolutionary process tends to serve adaptation, one may ask: what advantage does self-reflection confer? What are we able to do with it that we could not do without it? The obvious immediate answer is that self-reflection provides access to a new domain of knowledge, that relating to the self. An important point here is that it not only concerns one’s actions, intentions and experiences, but it also permits the viewing of one’s representations as representations, one’s beliefs as beliefs. This ‘relativization’ of knowledge paves way for decontextualization. Self-reflection thus brings about new information, it involves creating new pieces of cognitive structure which may also serve as ‘addresses’ to other information. For instance, one may become aware of acting stubbornly and note that this has previously proved to be maladaptive (Flekkoy, 1989). By consciously reflecting on the intentions behind one’s actions, one can elaborate one’s self-model and perhaps make it more fitting to the social community, or more coherent in itself (Oatley, 1988). The insights provided by self-reflection can help to integrate information belonging
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to different cognitive systems and thus mediate transfer. When a child has achieved competence in one domain, she may initially have access to that competence only in that domain. However, conscious knowledge of one’s intellectual functions creates conditions for a wide application of specific competences and learned rules. In the terminology of cognitive science, self-reflection provides declarative access to procedural knowledge. Kinsbourne (1988) and others have emphasized the mediating role of awareness in rendering special purpose programmes generally accessible. This preadapts the organism to a wide range of unforeseen contingencies. Self-reflection is thus at the root of the notion of voluntary choice. It enables the person to see himself or herself as an actor with different alternatives. One cannot gain a measure of control over one’s own thinking while one remains unaware of it. Here the notion of choice is central: we are (self-)conscious of what we do only to the extent that we are also conscious of what we do not do (Donaldson, 1978). From this point of view the ‘production’ or ‘mediation deficiency’, with which research on metamemory was much concerned 20 years ago, may be seen as a ‘stage’ in which a particular memory strategy is mastered as a skill, but not yet as a tool to be used at will. The emergence of voluntary control is the main issue in Vygotsky’s approach to the internalization of psychological processes. His description of how the child gains voluntary control on the intrapsychological plane over what had formerly existed only in social interaction, is well enough known. However, the role of self-reflection may also be viewed from other angles.
The Role of Self-Reflection What is the relation between self-reflection and reflections about the actions, intentions or beliefs ofothers? If we assume with Mead that, developmentally, they are but two sides of the same coin, we may expect them to develop in parallel. There appears to be but little evidence bearing directly on this issue, in spite of recent interest in the development of children’s theories of mind (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988), metarepresentation (Leslie, 1987), and second-order beliefs (Perner & Wimmer, 1985). However, available evidence seems to be broadly consistent with the notion that children’s awareness of their own mental processes is paralleled by a readiness to account for the actions of others in terms of their mental processes, though it appears that, during ontogenesis, reflections about the intentions of others often precede reflections about one’s own intentions, and questions of the type ‘why did he or she do it?’ precede questions of the type ‘why did I do it?‘. This issue will be further discussed later. Another approach to the role of self-reflection is suggested by phenomenographic analyses of psychological concepts. These analyses represent an attempt to characterize the different conceptions people can have of events and concepts, and to order these conceptions hierarchically, from less to more advanced. As Marton (1990) put it, an individual’s transition from a less to a more advanced conception is an important form of learning. In what ways, then, do the different-level conceptions of psychological processes differ from one another? Let us take as an example the five levels of ‘conceptions of learning’, as described by Saljo (1979). There seems to be a critical difference between, on the one hand, the three lower levels - (1) a quantitative increase in knowledge, (2)
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memorizing, (3) the acquisition of facts and methods - and, on the other, the two highest levels: (4) the abstraction of meaning and (5) an interpretative process aimed at the understanding of reality. The two highest levels (of these conceptions) seem to presuppose self-reflective processes. For instance, the idea that learning involves a new way of seeing the world is possible only if we understand that the world can be seen in different ways, that is, if we can view our conceptions us conceptions which may be compared and ordered. There is an important difference between considering alternative hypotheses about reality, and considering alternative ways of thinking about, or seeing, reality. It would be interesting to compare phenomenographic analyses of the development of different psychological concepts such as learning, memory, understanding, attention, and various motivational concepts. How are the conceptions in different domains related to each other? Are there logical or psychological connections between the different strands of sequential change (transition) from one level to another (Yussen, 1985)? The few psychological conception-hierarchies which can be found in the literature have this in common: the highest levels of conception seem to involve self-reflection and the notion of voluntary control. In this respect, they are characteristically different from the corresponding conceptions about physical phenomena and concepts. So far two levels of reflection have been distinguished. It is clear, however, that although they are different in prototypical cases, the distinction is one of degree; self-reflection is a graded phenomenon. In concrete instances it may be difficult enough to determine the characteristics of a person’s reflective processes. How could we study them? One way is to ask the person to give reasons and grounds for his or her actions and beliefs, or for the actions and beliefs of others: ‘why do you think this?‘, ‘why do your peers do that?’ and so on. This method, suggested by Vygotsky (1962), has been extensively used by Rauste-von Wright (e.g., 1983; in press) in studies of adolescent development. Some of the results are relevant in the present context. First, the reasons and grounds given by the subjects for their own action-patterns and beliefs, as well as for those of other people (peers and adults), show a wide range of what might be called levels of understanding or reflection, reminiscent of the hierarchy of conceptions studied in phenomenography. Second, there is clear-cut intru-individual variation in the following sense: the level of understanding and reflection shown in the answers of one person (as well as the ‘adequacy’ of his or her accounts) may vary as a function of the specific domain of life in question, and also as a function of whether he or she accounts for his or her own actions and beliefs or those of others. Third, inter-individual differences in any age-group are striking, and they tend to be related to the characteristics of the life processes of the persons in question. These results lead to the next question: what kind of process is the development of self-reflection? Two somewhat simplistic metaphors will be considered here. Self-reflection might be like a capacity (in the Piagetian sense) which in due course is added to the child’s repertoire of capacities. If it is, we would expect that once it emerges in some context, for instance in social contexts, it would tend to be accessible more or less automatically in other contexts such as learning. On the other hand, the development of self-reflection may be more like that of skills. In that case, we may expect it initially to be specific to the context in which it emerges, gradually to transfer more widely to new contexts where it proves to serve a purpose, and finally to become generally available, decontextualized as it were. Further, we may expect different types of experience to support the development
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of (the skill of) self-reflection in different domains. After all, there is a difference between reflecting about oneself as, say, a learner, or as a member of a gang of peers. If we assume that the skill metaphor is more adequate than the capacity metaphor, what consequences does this have for the ‘training’ of self-reflection? Before discussing this question, however, it is useful to consider the concept of metacognition.
Metacognition A clearcut distinction is generally made between metacognitive skills and knowledge. Metacognitive skills refer to the steps that people take to regulate and modify the progress of their cognitive activity: to learn such skills is to acquire procedures which regulate cognitive processes. The skills develop initially as by-products in the context of domain-specific learning; self-correcting activities may be seen as their early precursors (Bruner, 1986). Gradually, as the child learns to anticipate chains of events, the corrections are made in advance of overt action and become parts of an action plan, and so on. The concept of metacognitive knowledge is more problematic: it is far from obvious what should count as such knowledge. Many analyses of the concept, such as its usual subdivision into knowledge concerning person, task, and strategy variables (e.g., Wong, 1985), seem to beg essential questions. Let us say that a person can correctly compare the relative efficiency of some strategies for the learning of a particular task - does this qualify as metacognitive knowledge? After all, the comparison may be based on pieces of factual knowledge similar to those on which we base a comparison between different ways of, say, frying eggs. In order to determine whether the knowledge involved merits the prefix ‘metacognitive’, we have to ask the person to give reasons for his or her statement. Then we need to assess if these reasons convince us that he or she has some measure of insight into the relation between the task and the actor’s cognitive functioning. Essentially, metacognitive knowledge seems to involve reflective understanding of the process under consideration and of the actor’s role in it. This view has sometimes been stated explicitly, for instance by Yussen (1985, p. 253), who defines metacognition as “that mental activity for which other mental states or processes become the objects of reflection”. It is also implicit in the frequent characterization of metacognitive knowledge as “statable, fallible, and late developing”. However, the word ‘knowledge’ can easily, be misleading in this context: it is safer to speak about metacognitive beliefs or conceptions. Let us look at an example. A frequently cited instance of metacognitive knowledge is that a person ‘knows that he understands’ something. But what does it mean for a child ‘to understand’? Children’s conceptions of understanding - and of other cognitive processes - develop and change. One might thus distinguish between different kinds or ‘levels’ of metacognitive knowledge in the same sense as different levels of conceptions of psychological events are distinguished within structural approaches. In other words, metacognitive knowledge is not only a graded phenomenon (in a quantitative sense), it also undergoes fundamental qualitative changes during development. One corollary of this is that empirical studies of the relation between performance and metacognitive knowledge require analyses of the qualitative characteristics of the knowledge in question; a simple-minded use of, say, a few questionnaire items may easily render such comparisons meaningless.
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A pattern of results which emerges with some regularity from empirical studies of metacognitive training can be summarized as follows (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983). ‘Blind training’, i.e., training without explanations about what and why, leads to task-specific improvement but not to transfer. ‘Informed training’, in which the learners are told about the significance and rationale of the procedures, is more likely to provide insight and transfer, especially with older children, but the results tend to be complex and sometimes confusing. Perhaps some of these complexities could be resolved by studying the metacognitive conceptions of individual learners, their interpretations of the explanations offered, and the kind of use they make of the procedures taught. Interindividual variation in the understanding engendered by listening to explanations tends to be great. In any case, the best results have usually been obtained with so-called ‘self-regulation’ training, in which the scope and transferability of principles and procedures are explicitly taught and students are encouraged to explore them and try them in new situations. These results, like studies concerning the situated nature of learning and the consequent limitations of spontaneous decontextualization and transfer (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, & Newman 1989) suggest that, unlike basic metacognitive skills, advanced metacognitive conceptions are not learned automatically as by-products of purposeful cognitive activities. Even if they are explicitly taught, they can hardly be understood in some deeper sense unless they become objects of reflective thinking. In other words, they may remain ‘surface-level’ academic knowledge, or ‘inert’ knowledge (Whitehead, 1929) rather than being integrated into functional belief-systems. Moreover, insights into cognitive functioning may not be used to further new learning unless there is the motivation to use them. They are much more likely to be used, for instance, when the learners view themselves as being in charge of their learning than when they expect others to direct them (Resnick, 1989). Metacognitive knowledge provides opportunities for transfer, as it were; the more advanced the conceptions, the greater their potential value as vehicles for transfer, but they do not ensure transfer. People have to learn to make use of the knowledge. How, then, could they do this? Much of the current research on the training of reflective skills seem to be concerned with this very problem.
Training of Reflective Skills During the 1980s there was a considerable increase in the number and variety of training programs for adult learning emphasizing reflective skills. In spite of the great variation in terminology and frame of reference (cognitive, hermeneutic, existential, activity-theoretical etc.), these programs might, in some essential respects, be viewed as variations on a theme of Kurt Lewin (1948). Briefly, this theme consists of four parts. First, you do and experience. Second, you reflect upon your experiences - what did I learn? what did I feel? and so on - so as to understand them in perspective. Third, you conceptualize the new insights and use them to shape a more adequate conception of the matter in question, a better theory of it. And fourth, you try out your revised theory and look for new feedback. This theme has been developed in many ways, and the role of experience as the source of material for reflection has been both emphasized, for instance in Kolb’s
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(1984) influential model of experiential learning, and critically canvassed (Jarvis, 1987). However, common to most if not all formulations is the notion that self-reflective processes have the character of skills which can be learned and trained. It also seems that a common goal of the training procedures is to induce the learners to include self-reflection as an essential component of their action strategies in the contexts of education, work and so on (e.g., Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985; Harris, 1989). These training programs are usually based on the assumption that the participants already have mastered the art of self-reflection to a fair extent. Developmental psychologists, however, are faced with the problem of how to get reflective processes started, as it were. There is by now an impressive array of research in this area. A method which has proved promising and which also, at an intuitive level, is consistent with the argument developed in this paper, is that of ‘reciprocal teaching’ (Brown & Palincsar, 1989). This method provides not only social support, shared expertise, and role models, but also an impetus to self-reflection. What does it take to explain and teach something to others? First one has to decide what there is to be explained or taught, what kind of understanding/conception the teaching aims at. Second, one needs to consider what those who are taught know and understand already, what kind of conceptions they entertain. Finally, one has to assess how one’s own teaching is interpreted by the learners, what changes in their conceptions and behavior are brought about. Trying to understand another person’s point of view forces one to reflect on one’s own. There is evidence supporting the notion that reciprocal teaching can foster reflective processes in children (Brown & Palincsar, 1989), and an ongoing study by Rauste-von Wright suggests that the method (suitably modified) can be successfully used for this purpose with adult students as well. The emphasis on social interaction as a condition for the training of reflective skills, central to the method of reciprocal teaching, is today shared by most approaches to instruction. Among the advantages of social contexts for learning is that they elevate thinking to an observable status (Glaser, 1991): the reflective processes of the participants become apparent. This provides opportunities for understanding and shaping these processes. Focusing on the context of cognition also directs attention to the fact that knowledge is always ‘situated’, it is in part a product of the activity, context and culture in which it is learned and used (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). A consequence of this is that ‘training environments’ should be, ideally, similar to the environments in which the knowledge and skills are to be utilized. However, in a rapidly changing world the contexts of use are likely to change too, often in unforeseen ways. This necessitates a search for conditions of learning which increase the generality and transferability the decontextualization, as it were - of reflective skills. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1989) have emphasized the importance of the learner’s awareness of the functional potential of knowledge for the acquisition of other knowledge. Of equal importance is awareness of the potential of self-reflection as a tool for intentional learning. The creation of learning environments which support these aims is a challenging problem for research on instruction.
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JOHAN VON WRIGHT University of Helsinki, Finland “The beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows” John Donne (1628)
Abstract The development of reflective processes and the role of self-reflection in learning are examined. Attention is paid to the functions of self-reflection, the relation between self-reflection and reflections about the intentions and beliefs of others, and to methods for studying reflective processes. It is suggested that an analysis of the ‘levels’ of conceptions of psychological processes using the phenomenographic method may clarify the development of metacognitive beliefs. Finally, learning to make use of metacognitive knowledge and the ‘training’ of reflective skills are considered.
Introduction The idea that reflective thinking, and self-reflection especially, is at the centre of educational enterprises both as a goal and as a means is, of course, very old. It was still current in psychology during the early parts of this century, for instance in the cognitive psychology of Binet and James and the educational psychology of Dewey. Then it almost disappeared from the discipline during the era of behaviorism. The attempt to build up a scientific psychology of learning, starting from its beginnings in animal behavior, obscured from view those higher order processes which emerge only at higher levels of systemic organization. At the same time, the active role of the learner and his or her attempts to make sense of the world and to achieve self-direction, were largely explained away; they were considered of doubtful relevance in any attempt to construct a natural science of human behavior. The advent of the ‘cognitive revolution’ in the 1950s and 1960s brought goal-directed behavior back to the centre of the stage. However, the concept of learning was largely lost in the process. This is easy to understand when we look at the ‘model of man’ introduced by computer-analogy, and the emphasis of information processing. The storage of information became a focal problem, and the concept of memory - or
Opening lecture at the Fourth European Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction in Turku, Finland, August 24-28, 1991. Address for correspondence: J. von Wright, Dept. Psychology, University of Helsinki, Fabianinkatu 28, 00100 Helsinki, Finland. 59
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memories - largely displaced that of learning, which was transformed into the problem of describing and modelling (making programs for) efficient information-processing procedures. As Ohlsson (1990) pointed out, the cognitive approach has been concerned with the formation and execution of plans rather than with the shaping of the Image. The swinging back of the pendulum which we have witnessed during the past two decades is partly due to attempts to apply newly-gained insights to problems of instruction. When we study the acquisition of knowledge and skills in the context of education or work rather than in the controlled context of the laboratory, we cannot avoid being confronted with the active nature of human beings who try to make sense of events in terms of their own conceptions of reality. Nor can we avoid the problems involved in understanding intentional action, and the regulation of actions by the actors themselves. Thus we find a resurgence of old ideas in the psychology of learning to-day. These are partly in new guises relating to reflective thinking, self-directed activity, metacognitive knowledge and skills, and so on. However, discussion of these ideas is sometimes clouded by the fact that they are far from simple or unproblematic. Here the concept of self-reflection and its relation to metacognition will be examined.
Two Levels of Reflection There is a famous passage in Bartlett’s book Remembering (1932, p. 301), where he says “[Man] learns how to utilize the constituents of his own ‘schemes’, instead of being determined to action by the ‘schemes’ themselves . . . He finds out how to ‘turn around upon his schemata’ - a reaction literally rendered possible by consciousness, and the one which gives to consciousness its pre-eminent function”. Heavily criticized a few decades ago, the passage today seems suitable as a starting point for a discussion of the notion of ‘levels of reflection’. It seems useful to distinguish between two such levels, and approach this distinction from a currently popular point of view, that of the difference between novices and experts. Any mature adult in our culture qualifies as an expert on reflection; for a novice we may choose a typical child of, say, four years. The 4-year-old novice, then, masters a wide variety of routine events and can, in one sense of the word, reflect on them. Much of her knowledge is structured in terms of temporal-causal sequences: she has formed generalized event and action representations of what is going on in her everyday life. Her collaboration with adults and peers in various activities permits cognitive processes to be displayed, shared, and practised, so that she is able to modify her current mode of functioning. She can understand familiar actions in the sense of interpreting them in a larger context of goals and immediate motives. If we use the prefix ‘meta’ to refer to ‘higher-level’ processes, she can be said to display metacognitive skills. These are most clearly seen in her various self-correcting activities, but what might be called strategic knowledge is also evident in her ability to guess, predict and plan in the context of events which are familiar enough to be ‘understandable’ to her. She can thus use her knowledge of events and the causal texture of the environment for solving problems: she can see that this move rather than that leads to the removal of a current obstacle. That is, in her mind she can compare alternative ways of acting before committing herself to one of them. To sum up, she is capable of reflecting about many features of the world in the sense of considering and
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comparing them in her mind, and of reflecting upon her means of coping in familiar contexts. However, although her actions are often intentional - purposeful and directed towards conscious goals - she is unlikely to be capable of reflecting about herself as the intentional subject of her own actions. A crucial step towards greater expertise in reflection is associated with the development of the concept of self. The most convincing theory of this development seems to be that one acquires the concept of self by being treated as a self by others (Hat&, 1982). In this sense, the self is a social construct. To quote G. H. Mead (1934, p. 225): “Self-consciousness involves the individual’s becoming an object to himself by taking the attitudes of other individuals towards himself within an organized setting of social relationships, and . . . unless the individual had thus become an object to himself he would not be self-conscious or have a self at all.” This view has been developed in various ways. Oatley (1988, p. 378), for instance, suggests that “what we experience as consciousness, the phenomenology of explicit knowing, and knowing that we know, derives from the socially derived experience of the sense of self as director and as part of the comparison processes of consciousness”. Reflecting about one’s own knowledge or intentions involves an element which is absent from reflections about the surrounding world. Self-reflection presupposes, in the language of mental models, a ‘metamodel’: in order to reason about how I reason, I need access to a model of my reasoning performance. The distinction between these two levels of reflection has often been made by developmental psychologists such as Vygotsky, who draws a line between “soznanie” or consciousness in the broad sense, and “osoznanie” or conscious awareness (Wertsch, 1985). Self-reflection implies observing and putting an interpretation on one’s own actions, for instance, considering one’s own intentions and motives as objects of thought. Here, one’s knowledge of oneself is in principle as ‘indirect’ as that of another observer, and may even be less reliable - a person may not always be the best judge of his or her own intentions. For the sake of clarity, this argument may be repeated in other words. My immediate knowledge of my own intention is not based on a reflection about myself, but is an essential ingredient of the intentionality of my behavior (cf. von Wright, 1971). However, when I reflect about my own intention, I step back, as it were, and interpret it, and this interpretation is fallible, like all interpretations. Since the emergence of new functions in the evolutionary process tends to serve adaptation, one may ask: what advantage does self-reflection confer? What are we able to do with it that we could not do without it? The obvious immediate answer is that self-reflection provides access to a new domain of knowledge, that relating to the self. An important point here is that it not only concerns one’s actions, intentions and experiences, but it also permits the viewing of one’s representations as representations, one’s beliefs as beliefs. This ‘relativization’ of knowledge paves way for decontextualization. Self-reflection thus brings about new information, it involves creating new pieces of cognitive structure which may also serve as ‘addresses’ to other information. For instance, one may become aware of acting stubbornly and note that this has previously proved to be maladaptive (Flekkoy, 1989). By consciously reflecting on the intentions behind one’s actions, one can elaborate one’s self-model and perhaps make it more fitting to the social community, or more coherent in itself (Oatley, 1988). The insights provided by self-reflection can help to integrate information belonging
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to different cognitive systems and thus mediate transfer. When a child has achieved competence in one domain, she may initially have access to that competence only in that domain. However, conscious knowledge of one’s intellectual functions creates conditions for a wide application of specific competences and learned rules. In the terminology of cognitive science, self-reflection provides declarative access to procedural knowledge. Kinsbourne (1988) and others have emphasized the mediating role of awareness in rendering special purpose programmes generally accessible. This preadapts the organism to a wide range of unforeseen contingencies. Self-reflection is thus at the root of the notion of voluntary choice. It enables the person to see himself or herself as an actor with different alternatives. One cannot gain a measure of control over one’s own thinking while one remains unaware of it. Here the notion of choice is central: we are (self-)conscious of what we do only to the extent that we are also conscious of what we do not do (Donaldson, 1978). From this point of view the ‘production’ or ‘mediation deficiency’, with which research on metamemory was much concerned 20 years ago, may be seen as a ‘stage’ in which a particular memory strategy is mastered as a skill, but not yet as a tool to be used at will. The emergence of voluntary control is the main issue in Vygotsky’s approach to the internalization of psychological processes. His description of how the child gains voluntary control on the intrapsychological plane over what had formerly existed only in social interaction, is well enough known. However, the role of self-reflection may also be viewed from other angles.
The Role of Self-Reflection What is the relation between self-reflection and reflections about the actions, intentions or beliefs ofothers? If we assume with Mead that, developmentally, they are but two sides of the same coin, we may expect them to develop in parallel. There appears to be but little evidence bearing directly on this issue, in spite of recent interest in the development of children’s theories of mind (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988), metarepresentation (Leslie, 1987), and second-order beliefs (Perner & Wimmer, 1985). However, available evidence seems to be broadly consistent with the notion that children’s awareness of their own mental processes is paralleled by a readiness to account for the actions of others in terms of their mental processes, though it appears that, during ontogenesis, reflections about the intentions of others often precede reflections about one’s own intentions, and questions of the type ‘why did he or she do it?’ precede questions of the type ‘why did I do it?‘. This issue will be further discussed later. Another approach to the role of self-reflection is suggested by phenomenographic analyses of psychological concepts. These analyses represent an attempt to characterize the different conceptions people can have of events and concepts, and to order these conceptions hierarchically, from less to more advanced. As Marton (1990) put it, an individual’s transition from a less to a more advanced conception is an important form of learning. In what ways, then, do the different-level conceptions of psychological processes differ from one another? Let us take as an example the five levels of ‘conceptions of learning’, as described by Saljo (1979). There seems to be a critical difference between, on the one hand, the three lower levels - (1) a quantitative increase in knowledge, (2)
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memorizing, (3) the acquisition of facts and methods - and, on the other, the two highest levels: (4) the abstraction of meaning and (5) an interpretative process aimed at the understanding of reality. The two highest levels (of these conceptions) seem to presuppose self-reflective processes. For instance, the idea that learning involves a new way of seeing the world is possible only if we understand that the world can be seen in different ways, that is, if we can view our conceptions us conceptions which may be compared and ordered. There is an important difference between considering alternative hypotheses about reality, and considering alternative ways of thinking about, or seeing, reality. It would be interesting to compare phenomenographic analyses of the development of different psychological concepts such as learning, memory, understanding, attention, and various motivational concepts. How are the conceptions in different domains related to each other? Are there logical or psychological connections between the different strands of sequential change (transition) from one level to another (Yussen, 1985)? The few psychological conception-hierarchies which can be found in the literature have this in common: the highest levels of conception seem to involve self-reflection and the notion of voluntary control. In this respect, they are characteristically different from the corresponding conceptions about physical phenomena and concepts. So far two levels of reflection have been distinguished. It is clear, however, that although they are different in prototypical cases, the distinction is one of degree; self-reflection is a graded phenomenon. In concrete instances it may be difficult enough to determine the characteristics of a person’s reflective processes. How could we study them? One way is to ask the person to give reasons and grounds for his or her actions and beliefs, or for the actions and beliefs of others: ‘why do you think this?‘, ‘why do your peers do that?’ and so on. This method, suggested by Vygotsky (1962), has been extensively used by Rauste-von Wright (e.g., 1983; in press) in studies of adolescent development. Some of the results are relevant in the present context. First, the reasons and grounds given by the subjects for their own action-patterns and beliefs, as well as for those of other people (peers and adults), show a wide range of what might be called levels of understanding or reflection, reminiscent of the hierarchy of conceptions studied in phenomenography. Second, there is clear-cut intru-individual variation in the following sense: the level of understanding and reflection shown in the answers of one person (as well as the ‘adequacy’ of his or her accounts) may vary as a function of the specific domain of life in question, and also as a function of whether he or she accounts for his or her own actions and beliefs or those of others. Third, inter-individual differences in any age-group are striking, and they tend to be related to the characteristics of the life processes of the persons in question. These results lead to the next question: what kind of process is the development of self-reflection? Two somewhat simplistic metaphors will be considered here. Self-reflection might be like a capacity (in the Piagetian sense) which in due course is added to the child’s repertoire of capacities. If it is, we would expect that once it emerges in some context, for instance in social contexts, it would tend to be accessible more or less automatically in other contexts such as learning. On the other hand, the development of self-reflection may be more like that of skills. In that case, we may expect it initially to be specific to the context in which it emerges, gradually to transfer more widely to new contexts where it proves to serve a purpose, and finally to become generally available, decontextualized as it were. Further, we may expect different types of experience to support the development
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of (the skill of) self-reflection in different domains. After all, there is a difference between reflecting about oneself as, say, a learner, or as a member of a gang of peers. If we assume that the skill metaphor is more adequate than the capacity metaphor, what consequences does this have for the ‘training’ of self-reflection? Before discussing this question, however, it is useful to consider the concept of metacognition.
Metacognition A clearcut distinction is generally made between metacognitive skills and knowledge. Metacognitive skills refer to the steps that people take to regulate and modify the progress of their cognitive activity: to learn such skills is to acquire procedures which regulate cognitive processes. The skills develop initially as by-products in the context of domain-specific learning; self-correcting activities may be seen as their early precursors (Bruner, 1986). Gradually, as the child learns to anticipate chains of events, the corrections are made in advance of overt action and become parts of an action plan, and so on. The concept of metacognitive knowledge is more problematic: it is far from obvious what should count as such knowledge. Many analyses of the concept, such as its usual subdivision into knowledge concerning person, task, and strategy variables (e.g., Wong, 1985), seem to beg essential questions. Let us say that a person can correctly compare the relative efficiency of some strategies for the learning of a particular task - does this qualify as metacognitive knowledge? After all, the comparison may be based on pieces of factual knowledge similar to those on which we base a comparison between different ways of, say, frying eggs. In order to determine whether the knowledge involved merits the prefix ‘metacognitive’, we have to ask the person to give reasons for his or her statement. Then we need to assess if these reasons convince us that he or she has some measure of insight into the relation between the task and the actor’s cognitive functioning. Essentially, metacognitive knowledge seems to involve reflective understanding of the process under consideration and of the actor’s role in it. This view has sometimes been stated explicitly, for instance by Yussen (1985, p. 253), who defines metacognition as “that mental activity for which other mental states or processes become the objects of reflection”. It is also implicit in the frequent characterization of metacognitive knowledge as “statable, fallible, and late developing”. However, the word ‘knowledge’ can easily, be misleading in this context: it is safer to speak about metacognitive beliefs or conceptions. Let us look at an example. A frequently cited instance of metacognitive knowledge is that a person ‘knows that he understands’ something. But what does it mean for a child ‘to understand’? Children’s conceptions of understanding - and of other cognitive processes - develop and change. One might thus distinguish between different kinds or ‘levels’ of metacognitive knowledge in the same sense as different levels of conceptions of psychological events are distinguished within structural approaches. In other words, metacognitive knowledge is not only a graded phenomenon (in a quantitative sense), it also undergoes fundamental qualitative changes during development. One corollary of this is that empirical studies of the relation between performance and metacognitive knowledge require analyses of the qualitative characteristics of the knowledge in question; a simple-minded use of, say, a few questionnaire items may easily render such comparisons meaningless.
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A pattern of results which emerges with some regularity from empirical studies of metacognitive training can be summarized as follows (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983). ‘Blind training’, i.e., training without explanations about what and why, leads to task-specific improvement but not to transfer. ‘Informed training’, in which the learners are told about the significance and rationale of the procedures, is more likely to provide insight and transfer, especially with older children, but the results tend to be complex and sometimes confusing. Perhaps some of these complexities could be resolved by studying the metacognitive conceptions of individual learners, their interpretations of the explanations offered, and the kind of use they make of the procedures taught. Interindividual variation in the understanding engendered by listening to explanations tends to be great. In any case, the best results have usually been obtained with so-called ‘self-regulation’ training, in which the scope and transferability of principles and procedures are explicitly taught and students are encouraged to explore them and try them in new situations. These results, like studies concerning the situated nature of learning and the consequent limitations of spontaneous decontextualization and transfer (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, & Newman 1989) suggest that, unlike basic metacognitive skills, advanced metacognitive conceptions are not learned automatically as by-products of purposeful cognitive activities. Even if they are explicitly taught, they can hardly be understood in some deeper sense unless they become objects of reflective thinking. In other words, they may remain ‘surface-level’ academic knowledge, or ‘inert’ knowledge (Whitehead, 1929) rather than being integrated into functional belief-systems. Moreover, insights into cognitive functioning may not be used to further new learning unless there is the motivation to use them. They are much more likely to be used, for instance, when the learners view themselves as being in charge of their learning than when they expect others to direct them (Resnick, 1989). Metacognitive knowledge provides opportunities for transfer, as it were; the more advanced the conceptions, the greater their potential value as vehicles for transfer, but they do not ensure transfer. People have to learn to make use of the knowledge. How, then, could they do this? Much of the current research on the training of reflective skills seem to be concerned with this very problem.
Training of Reflective Skills During the 1980s there was a considerable increase in the number and variety of training programs for adult learning emphasizing reflective skills. In spite of the great variation in terminology and frame of reference (cognitive, hermeneutic, existential, activity-theoretical etc.), these programs might, in some essential respects, be viewed as variations on a theme of Kurt Lewin (1948). Briefly, this theme consists of four parts. First, you do and experience. Second, you reflect upon your experiences - what did I learn? what did I feel? and so on - so as to understand them in perspective. Third, you conceptualize the new insights and use them to shape a more adequate conception of the matter in question, a better theory of it. And fourth, you try out your revised theory and look for new feedback. This theme has been developed in many ways, and the role of experience as the source of material for reflection has been both emphasized, for instance in Kolb’s
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(1984) influential model of experiential learning, and critically canvassed (Jarvis, 1987). However, common to most if not all formulations is the notion that self-reflective processes have the character of skills which can be learned and trained. It also seems that a common goal of the training procedures is to induce the learners to include self-reflection as an essential component of their action strategies in the contexts of education, work and so on (e.g., Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985; Harris, 1989). These training programs are usually based on the assumption that the participants already have mastered the art of self-reflection to a fair extent. Developmental psychologists, however, are faced with the problem of how to get reflective processes started, as it were. There is by now an impressive array of research in this area. A method which has proved promising and which also, at an intuitive level, is consistent with the argument developed in this paper, is that of ‘reciprocal teaching’ (Brown & Palincsar, 1989). This method provides not only social support, shared expertise, and role models, but also an impetus to self-reflection. What does it take to explain and teach something to others? First one has to decide what there is to be explained or taught, what kind of understanding/conception the teaching aims at. Second, one needs to consider what those who are taught know and understand already, what kind of conceptions they entertain. Finally, one has to assess how one’s own teaching is interpreted by the learners, what changes in their conceptions and behavior are brought about. Trying to understand another person’s point of view forces one to reflect on one’s own. There is evidence supporting the notion that reciprocal teaching can foster reflective processes in children (Brown & Palincsar, 1989), and an ongoing study by Rauste-von Wright suggests that the method (suitably modified) can be successfully used for this purpose with adult students as well. The emphasis on social interaction as a condition for the training of reflective skills, central to the method of reciprocal teaching, is today shared by most approaches to instruction. Among the advantages of social contexts for learning is that they elevate thinking to an observable status (Glaser, 1991): the reflective processes of the participants become apparent. This provides opportunities for understanding and shaping these processes. Focusing on the context of cognition also directs attention to the fact that knowledge is always ‘situated’, it is in part a product of the activity, context and culture in which it is learned and used (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). A consequence of this is that ‘training environments’ should be, ideally, similar to the environments in which the knowledge and skills are to be utilized. However, in a rapidly changing world the contexts of use are likely to change too, often in unforeseen ways. This necessitates a search for conditions of learning which increase the generality and transferability the decontextualization, as it were - of reflective skills. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1989) have emphasized the importance of the learner’s awareness of the functional potential of knowledge for the acquisition of other knowledge. Of equal importance is awareness of the potential of self-reflection as a tool for intentional learning. The creation of learning environments which support these aims is a challenging problem for research on instruction.
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