Metacognitive Domain

In Chapter 10 of Lee & Owens, the five domains of learning include the cognitive or thought processes, affective, meaning a learners feelings and attitudes, motor, the learners physical movements, psychomotor which involves movement without thinking. Last but not least, the metacognivitive domain includes thought processes involved in "learning how to learn" that have been brought to the automatic level. Lee & Owens cite this as the strategies learners use for learning without thinking about it. In class, our group was given the task of explaining a real world example from our own learning that would indicate the metacognitive process. What made this so interesting was that while reading about the metacognitive process to gain a better understanding my colleague Dwight was presented with a word that neither he nor I knew, so without thinking Dwight immediately highlighted the word, copied and pasted the word into an online dictionary service, read the material presented and committed it to memory, all while I was watching him perform these tasks!! WOW! What a great example of what the metacognitive domain is all about. I observed the steps and in a way learned that if I find myself in similar situation that I can use those same steps to identify a word I don't know. In a perfect world, I wouldn't have known how to find the definition of a word and would have learned how by watching Dwight initiate learning through the metacognitive domain. The metacognitive domain is by far the most important of the domains because it allows you to observe problem solving strategies and apply them to other situations. Lee & Owens say it is the least written about and least understood of the domains, but after experiencing it first hand I don't see how it could be any clearer.