Why Learning Conversations Matter: The Social Dimensions of Metacognition
Making study practices visible through reflection, dialogue, and research-informed learning
Students bring a wealth of knowledge and experience about studying into college. They've developed routines, tried different approaches, and formed ideas about what helps them learn. Yet they may have relatively few opportunities to examine those practices, understand why they use them, or learn how their classmates approach similar challenges.
What happens when we create those opportunities?
That question is at the heart of Study Strategy Swap Bingo™, a facilitated learning experience designed to make students' study practices visible, create opportunities for metacognitive inquiry through social interaction, and support more deliberate decisions about learning.
The experience draws on research into metacognition, self-regulated learning, learning strategies, and the social dimensions of learning. It also reflects a sociological understanding that our practices and assumptions develop within social and educational contexts, and that interactions with others can help us examine what we have come to take for granted.
Making the Familiar Visible
Students often describe studying in familiar terms: reviewing notes, highlighting readings, making flashcards, studying with friends, or preparing for exams.
But those descriptions tell us relatively little about what students actually do, how they make decisions, or how they determine whether their studying is helping them learn.
Research on metacognition and self-regulated learning emphasizes the importance of learners' awareness of their own processes and their capacity to plan, monitor, evaluate, and adjust their approaches (Zimmerman, 2002; Panadero, 2017).
Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ provides a concrete starting point for this kind of inquiry.
Students begin with an interactive Bingo card (shown right in mobile view) featuring 24 study practices organized into three categories:
Planning to Study
Actively Studying, and
Checking & Adjusting
They start by identifying the practices they already use and examining patterns in their selections.
Across facilitations, I've watched students recognize things about their studying that they hadn't previously noticed.
Some discover that much of their effort goes into planning, with relatively little attention to actively studying. Others recognize that they rarely plan. Still others notice that checking how well their studying worked is largely absent from their routines.
These observations give students something specific to consider about their own learning.
They also raise a broader question: How did students come to understand studying in the ways they do?
From a sociological perspective, study practices are not simply individual choices. They develop through participation in educational settings, interactions with teachers and peers, experiences of assessment, and expectations about what successful learning looks like.
Berger and Luckmann's (1966/1967) foundational work on the social construction of reality offers a useful lens here. Understandings developed through social experience can become familiar and taken for granted. Applied to studying, this perspective invites us to consider how students develop assumptions about what studying involves and what counts as evidence that learning has occurred.
The Bingo card introduces a way to examine those familiar practices. Students can begin recognizing patterns, identifying activities they seldom engage in, and asking questions about their approaches.
And then the conversation begins.
Learning About Learning Through Other People
Metacognition is often described as thinking about one's own thinking. Although useful, that description can make metacognition seem like an entirely private activity.
Research offers a more complex picture.
Work on the social and cultural dimensions of metacognition invites us to consider relationships between individual awareness and the social contexts in which people develop and exercise metacognitive capacities (van der Plas, 2022). Research on socially shared regulation of learning also demonstrates the importance of examining how learners monitor and regulate learning in collaborative contexts (Panadero & Järvelä, 2015).
These are distinct lines of inquiry, and not every peer conversation constitutes socially shared regulation. But together they encourage us to look more closely at how interaction with others can contribute to reflection on one's own learning.
In Study Strategy Swap Bingo™, students find classmates who use strategies they don't use themselves.
They ask a simple question:
"What does that actually look like when you do it?"
That question matters.
Naming a study strategy and explaining how one actually uses it are different activities. When students describe their processes, they make aspects of their learning practices available for others to examine, compare, and question.
And sometimes, the act of explaining a familiar practice invites the student doing the explaining to think about it differently, too.
I've watched students compare their Bingo cards, recognize similarities and differences, and spontaneously begin discussing what those patterns might mean. They describe their approaches, ask questions, and teach one another techniques they've developed through experience.
Other facilitators have observed this as well.
Dr. Richard Van Dyke, Assistant Director of Tutoring & Learning Support, described the experience this way:
"The [Study Strategy Swap Bingo] game yielded some of the most significant sharing of techniques among the students themselves as they discussed and taught their own processes to each other."
His observation captures an important dimension of the experience: students are contributing to one another's understanding of learning.
The exchange goes beyond introducing classmates to unfamiliar strategies. It creates opportunities for students to articulate their thinking, encounter alternative approaches, and reconsider aspects of their own practices.
In this way, social interaction becomes part of the opportunity for metacognitive inquiry.
When Familiar Strategies Become Questions Worth Investigating
Research about the effectiveness of study strategies is another important part of the experience.
Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed ten commonly used learning techniques and found stronger evidence for approaches such as practice testing and distributed practice than for highlighting alone. Donoghue and Hattie's (2021) meta-analysis further examined these techniques, while cautioning that much of the available evidence concerned surface learning outcomes.
These findings are valuable, but applying them requires attention to what students are actually doing, what they're trying to learn, and how learning is being assessed.
During one Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ session, a student explained that highlighting worked well for her, even though the research we were discussing suggested that highlighting alone generally has limited effectiveness.
I invited her to tell us more about how she highlighted.
As she described her approach, we learned that she was doing considerably more than marking text. She used color-coding, annotated what she read, identified key ideas, and made decisions about which information mattered.
Other students joined the conversation. They compared their own approaches, described how they used colors, and began examining differences between simply marking information and actively working with it.
The discussion revealed something important: students using the same word to describe a study strategy may be engaging in quite different learning activities.
From a metacognitive perspective, the conversation created opportunities to examine the processes underlying a familiar practice.
From a sociological perspective, it also illustrates how shared language can conceal differences in meaning and experience. Students may believe they're talking about the same activity until they begin explaining what that activity involves.
The research helped open the inquiry. Students' experiences gave the group something concrete to investigate.
Rather than treating research findings as verdicts on students' practices, the experience invites students to consider evidence alongside their own experiences and examine how strategies might serve different learning purposes.
Questioning What Counts as Effective Studying
These conversations sometimes move beyond particular techniques to broader assumptions about learning.
In different sessions, students have explored distinctions between taking practice tests and testing themselves, remembering information for an exam and developing deeper understanding, and earning good grades and understanding how their studying contributed to those results.
One observation has stayed with me: students can earn A's without necessarily knowing how or why.
That recognition raises important metacognitive questions.
How do students determine whether their studying is effective?
What evidence do they use?
Are they evaluating their understanding, their ability to recall information, their performance on assessments, or their capacity to use what they've learned in new situations?
It also raises sociological questions about the educational environments in which students develop their ideas about learning.
Assessment practices, institutional expectations, and prior experiences can influence what students come to regard as successful studying. If a familiar approach has helped them earn desirable grades, they may have had little reason to examine it more closely.
Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ provides an opportunity to bring those assumptions into conversation.
Students can consider what they mean by effective studying, how their purposes might differ, and whether the approaches they use support the kinds of learning they want or need to accomplish.
The aim is to support more informed judgment about learning.
From Recognition to Deliberate Choice
Reflection becomes particularly valuable when learners can use what they recognize to inform subsequent decisions.
Research on self-regulated learning emphasizes the relationship between monitoring one's learning and making strategic adjustments (Zimmerman, 2002; Panadero, 2017).
Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ concludes by inviting students to choose a strategy they want to try and develop a specific plan for using it.
Across sessions, I've observed students connect these choices to what they recognized earlier in the experience.
Some students who noticed they rarely planned chose a planning strategy. Others recognized that a recent exam offered an opportunity to reflect on their studying before preparing for the next one.
These choices suggest that students were drawing on what they had recognized and examined about their own learning to determine what they might do next. In one first-year experience class, 13 of the 14 students who completed the exit ticket indicated that they probably would or definitely would use at least one strategy from the session that week.
Taken together, the conversations and students’ responses bring the purpose into focus: creating space to examine familiar practices, learn from others, and plan a realistic next step for what matters to them.
Bring that conversation to your students with the Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ Facilitator Toolkit, a ready-to-use 55–60-minute session with resources for reflection and follow-up. The Facilitator Toolkit includes everything you need to prepare, facilitate the experience, and capture observations and feedback for learning and assessment.
The Author: Dr. Janine Bower is a sociologist, educator, and learning strategist with more than 20 years of experience in higher education. As co-founder and Principal Learning Strategist at B Optimal Consulting, she designs and facilitates learning experiences and resources that help people direct learning with greater intention, recognize and build capabilities, and put what they learn to work for what matters to them.
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