Metamemory: Declarative Knowledge And Procedural Knowledge

Metamemory is the knowledge we have about our memory. It allows us to reflect and observe our memory. Our knowledge plays an important part of our ability to do many things such as, strategy selection, monitoring our comprehension, performance evaluation, planning and the allocation of cognitive resources. There are two main aspects of metamemory: declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge allows us to assess the contents of our memory and knowledge of certain intellectual tasks like problem solving and reading. It also allows us to understand when it use certain strategies to solve problems and why they work. Procedural knowledge allows us to notice and control our memory’s performance. Within these two aspects
there are three declarative subcomponents and two procedural subcomponents (Schraw & Nietfield, 2010). The declarative subcomponents consist of content, task and conditional knowledge.
The content aspect of our declarative knowledge allows us to know whether we have enough knowledge to meet the demands of the task that is being accomplished and the task aspect allows us to determine if we fully understand the demands that the task we are completing is requiring of us. Lastly, the conditional knowledge aspect allows us to answer the when, where, and whys of when to use a specific strategy or under what conditions we are able to attain prime performance. It is thought that conditional knowledge is the most important of these three aspects because it plays a major role in self-regulation (Schraw & Nietfield, 2010).
The procedural subcomponents include control and monitoring. The control aspect includes regulatory processes such as planning, sifting through and selecting relevant information, resource allocation decisions, selecting relevant strategies and inferencing (Schraw & Nietfield, 2010). The monitoring subcomponent contains a variety of self-assessment strategies like ease-of-learning judgements, judgements of learning prior to the task, feeling-of-knowing judgements made during learning and comprehension monitoring judgements that are made during or after the task (Schraw & Nietfield,
2010). Metamemory affects learning in several different ways but with respect to the efficient use of limited cognitive resources, strategy use, and comprehension monitoring. Sometimes we experience difficulty learning because of cognitive overload, or too much mental “work” or processing but not enough cognitive resources at our disposal. However, research shows that when we use our declarative and procedural knowledge we learn more efficiently. This is because we are able to plan, sort, sequence, and monitor learning tasks (Schraw & Nietfield, 2010). Studies show that metamemory is constructed in three distinct ways. First are hands on experiences that provide declarative knowledge about certain tasks. It also provides procedural knowledge about preferred performance. The second way is through skilled models that provide feedback in such a way that enables the person to distinguish between effective and less-effective strategies. The last way children learn is through self-refection and group reflection. This is where the children can discuss what strategies worked and which were less effective. This also provides an opportunity to advance performance in the future (Schraw & Nietfield, 2010). Ultimately, metamemory awareness develops late and in increments yet it has an important bearing on memory and cognitive performance. Metamemory is not strongly linked to other cognitive influences such as intelligence and memory capacity. However, it develops as a gathering of understanding, directed modeling and feedback, as well as, individual and group reflection (Schraw & Nietfield, 2010).