Causality and Good Habits in Education

Some classes at my school require the students to periodically produce a meta-cognitive exercise, which consists of answering several questions about how you are doing, what you can improve on, and what your goals are.

They do this allegedly because very successful people can think about how they are thinking, and so I suppose the reasoning behind having us do this is "oh, let's have them do this thing successful people do and then they will be successful."

Random grammar note! If you follow my other blog, Fleex's Lab, you'll notice that over there I always place punctuation outside quotation marks. I do that because it is more logical, unambiguous, and looks more like programming, which is the subject of that blog. Over here I'll make some minimal effort to adhere to formal writing standards, as demonstrated by this random and totally unrelated tangent which has dragged on for a while now.

Anyway, just because successful people do something doesn't mean that you will be successful if you do it. The causality might be the other way around: people who are successful do it because they are successful, and they are successful because their mind works in this way. Look at it another way: many successful people are arrogant and rich. Should we cultivate arrogance and give lots of money to students in order to make them successful? No! That would be silly, because the cause-and-effect relationship doesn't allow that to work.

It might be entirely true that trying to use metacognition will tune your brain to make you think more effectively, or maybe you can't do anything about it. I'd like to see a study sometime; I will look it up soonish.