Monitoring: Conceptual Background and
Definition
The metacognitive processes involved in
self-awareness of personal cognition and the monitoring of various
components of one’s thinking during task
performance.
After a student implements their plan for a
specific task, they can draw upon 2 sources of information to
monitor their performance—real world performance and
cognitive representations of that performance (Winne &
Jamieson-Noel, 2002). Drawing largely on the research of
Nelson and Narens (1990), a variety of metacognitive judgments have
been postulated to occur during performance monitoring (Pintrich,
2000a; Winne & Jamieson-Noel, 2002). According to
Pintrich (2000b), judgments of learning (JOLs) encompasses a
variety of monitoring activities such as the student: (a) becoming
aware that they are not comprehending what they have just read or
heard; (b) becoming aware they are reading or studying too quickly
or slowly; (c) engaging in self-questioning to self-check
understanding; and (d) performing a self-memory test on material to
check on readiness for an exam, etc. Feelings (judgments)
of knowing(FOK) describe the metacognitive process of the
student assigning a probability to the “information that is
believed to be stored in memory but that the learner cannot recall
at the moment”(Winne & Jamieson-Noel, 2002, p. 552). One
classroom example could be a student having some recall of an
instructional experience (e.g., teacher lecture, class discussion),
but being unable to recall the specific material on a formal exam
(Pintrich, 2000b). In SRL,
monitoringincludes the metacognitive components of
being aware of one’s personal cognition and the monitoring of
various aspects of one’s cognition during task
performance(Pintrich, 2000b).
The research literature on monitoring motivation
and affective domains is limited when compared to that for
cognition (metacognitive awareness of monitoring). According
to Pintrich (2000b), the primary focus has been on interventions
designed to make students more aware of their motivational beliefs
and modifying them in a more positive direction (e.g.,
attributional retraining interventions). In the behavioral
domain, where time and effort management behaviors were described
for the planning and activation stage, monitoring might consist of
“tweaking” a student’s original time management
plan (e.g., changing from the original plan to study 1 hour to 3
hours). Self- observation is a behavioral skill important for
determining when the self-evaluative feedback information requires
a “tweak” of the original plan.
