¶ … Metacognition and Effective Study Strategies Among African-American College and University Students, Bernadette Nwafor discusses the fact that many African-American students have trouble with basic concentration and retention skills and how the implementation of various study techniques could enhance student concentration. Nwarfor purports that those students that try to understand what they are reading through "meaningfulness, collaboration and establishment of relationships between new ideas and old experiences" are more likely to do better on tests than those who learn by merely reading through text or memorization It is her perception that African-American students learn better when they can relate to the material in question. In this article she studies the three kinds of memory (sensory, short-term and long-term memory) as she shows that if a person associates something familiar with new material they are able to retain it better in their long-term memory. She cites for her example a study by Ormond that...
Meta-cognition, which is "students' knowledge and beliefs regarding their own cognitive processes and students' attempts to regulate their cognitive processes to maximize learning and memory." Nwafor also cites the work by Eggen and Kauchak which basically explores two types of metacognition which are meta-attention and meta-memory. These two types basically explore attention and also a person's ability to use certain tools to enhance memory. Nwarfor believes that it is not what we study that will enable us to learn. She shows that it is how we study which will prove effectiveness in learning. It is the tools that you learn to use to study that will help you to retain information better. She also uses note taking as an example of an effective study tool. In her opinion, if teachers would encourage note taking, students would be more apt to take effective notes and thereby would be able to retain more information. This note taking would foster organization which would…
