The Intersection of Metacognition and Intelligence

Dear Colleagues,

Intelligence has been defined in a variety of ways, mainly focusing on our cognitive capacities—how easily we understand, how quickly we can find ways to solve something, and how successfully we can find the best solution to a problem. How intelligent a student is has largely been evaluated by test performance in the classroom, and it is difficult for the lay person to disagree with the notion that individuals with higher academic grades are more intelligent than those with lower academic grades. In this Special Issue, we are interested in the less researched, more complex factors that affect one’s perception of intelligence, including metacognitive biases, the impostor phenomenon, illusions of learning, and feelings of entitlement.

Metacognition has been defined as the process of two components, monitoring and control. When we monitor our learning, we might judge that we do not understand the question. Given this, we could then control our behavior accordingly. For instance, we might spend more time studying or seek more information. If both the monitoring and control processes were in place, then learning is more likely to occur, leading to a heightened test performance and the perception of high intelligence. What, though, impacts the control process? There are some data that suggest that even when one’s monitoring process is intact, the control process might be obstructed for other reasons. For instance, people who fall high on the impostorism scale might be less likely to ask for feedback, first-generation students might feel anxiety about being “found out” that they do not understand as easily as others, East Asian students are less likely to say their opinions out loud, and one’s socioeconomic background seems to affect the amount of entitlement one feels. Such data suggest that when one is aware that they do not fully understand the problem, they are not likely to seek the help that would be needed to fill their knowledge gap. In any educational setting, such factors would be devastating to the learning process.

To take one real-world example, consider the diverse college class. When explaining a complicated problem, there is sure to be some uncertainty in the minds of many students. Many are likely to monitor their ongoing learning, and will, correctly, judge that they are confused, or that they need more time to process the information. While an intelligent control strategy might then be to raise one’s hand and ask for clarification, very few students might actually do so. It is easy to imagine that students might feel nervous about being the only one who is confused, about being different than their classmates, or even evaluated by their teacher as someone “not so intelligent”. Ironically, is a lack of intelligence based on the idea that one knows when one does not know and how to seek the information needed?

Intelligence has been mostly thought of as something observed or unobserved, including the correctness of an answer, the quickness of a solution, and even one’s visible behaviors that represent curiosity—time allocation, grit, and persistence. This special issue aims to be a collection of papers examining the more subtle factors that might change the ways in which one's intelligence is perceived, either by oneself or by others. Thus, we are interested in papers that:

1. Present factors that would have an effect on one’s metacognitive control decisions;
2. Provide reasons for why such factors differ across individuals or groups (gender, race, and ethnicity);
3. Suggest ways in which to address any advantages or disadvantages that might occur;
4. Offer a real-world perspective of intelligence in a social setting, such as in the classroom.

A few example papers that fall nicely within these categories are the following:

• Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Kroeper, K. M., and Murphy, M. C. (2020). Feeling like an imposter: The effect of perceived classroom competition on the daily psychological experiences of first-generation college students. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(5), 647-657.
• Aviv Orner and Hadar Netz (2021): Taking, begging, or waiting for the floor: students’ social backgrounds, entitlement and agency in classroom discourse, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2021.1989573.
• Ji, E., Son, L. K., and Kim, M. S. (2022). Emotion perception rules abide by cultural display rules: Koreans and Americans weigh outward emotion expressions (emoticons) differently. Experimental Psychology, 69(2), 83-103.

Please note that the “Planned Papers” Section on the webpage does not imply that these papers will eventually be accepted; all manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s normal and rigorous peer review process.

Prof. Dr. Lisa K. Son
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Intelligence is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.