Multifarious replicas in metacognition and mindfulness

Abstract

Pedagogy has been influenced by studies on cognitive psychology in recent decades leading research towards metacognitive approaches. Metacognition and Mindfulness have been standings used in cognitive pedagogical approaches with identical interpretations. Metacognition being a concept aligned with western scientific approach received liquidity while mindfulness being a Buddhist philosophical approach to the mind does not interact much in research. The study attempts to materialize a taxonomy for the concept: mindfulness in Buddhist philosophy and to contrast it with the taxonomy of metacognition thereby investigating the replicas of the two. Taxonomy of metacognition is constructed in twofold dimensions: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills. Metacognitive knowledge is a construct of three super categories: declarative, procedural, and conditional metacognitive knowledge. The second core-component: metacognitive skills consists of regulation of cognition and executive functioning/metacognitive experiences. Mindfulness in contrast encapsulates three developmental stages in category level: remembering and recollecting (sati), alertness (sampajana), and ardency/compunction (atappa/ottappa). Remembering and recollecting consists frames of references: body, feelings, mind and mental qualities at super-category level. Alertness being the second category involves three super-categories and occurs between the mind and activities in the body as they are happening. Ardency/compunction includes the desire to avoid the unbeneficial coupled with desire to stimulate the beneficial. Such taxonomies remain the material for semantic analysis in contrast in category, super- category and sub-category levels. The quintessence of both constructions: metacognition and mindfulness remains identical paving category level replicas in reflection or remembering. The sub-category, super-category and category levels remain judiciously identical with distinctly agreed semantics. Thus the two taxonomies remain exact in their alignment in sub-category, super- category and category levels that function in sequence constructing either in metacognition or mindfulness. The replicas of semantics in the two taxonomies are abundant. The originality of taxonomy of mindfulness stands due to the mediating orchestration stage: alertness correlating body with the mind which manipulates the body. Taxonomy of Metacognition does not inevitably include such venture of orchestration, thus lacking a scheme of synchronization. Studies oriented for calibration of such taxonomy for applied concerns in to the fields such as education, learning, cognitive psychology, pedagogy, psychopathology are prescribed.