ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author looks at meta-cognition, learners' active monitoring of their learning processes, and discusses the relationship between learning and development. There are three ways that we as individuals come to know something: Direct experience, verbal transmission of information and the reorganizing of what we already know into a new configuration. A constructionist view of learning starts from the position that learning is the act of interpreting experience, that interpretation is unique to each individual and is both enabled and constrained by the individual’s process of sense making. The new meaning the individual constructs may confirm or alter the existing meaning structures that the individual has in long-term memory. A type of meaning structure that is of particular importance to the improvement of learning is meta-cognition: our knowledge of our own cognitive processes.
