Metacognitive Sovereignty - Data Must Return in the First Person

Is the student a source of data or a participant in their own understanding?

Before entering the classroom, a student has already left traces.

A platform may record login times, clicks, pauses, errors, correct answers, and the amount of time spent on each activity. The school holds grades, attendance records, assessments, and comparisons with other students. In a research setting, EEG or fNIRS may add electrical and hemodynamic traces produced during specific tasks.

But perhaps the most important question has not yet been asked:

What does the student understand about the knowledge produced from their own existence?

Data circulate among teachers, researchers, families, administrators, companies, platforms, and governments. Yet they rarely return to the person who produced them in a language that can be understood, contextualized, questioned, and used.

The NeuroEducation of Weichö proposes another relationship: the student should not remain the silent object of measurement. They must participate in the interpretation.

Data are not the person

EEG records differences in electrical potential at the scalp. fNIRS measures relative changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin in superficial cortical regions. Grades register responses according to previously defined criteria. Clicks show actions performed through an interface.

None of these data, alone, reveal:

• what the student was thinking;

• why they interrupted the task;

• what the activity meant to them;

• whether they were afraid, hungry, tired, or in pain;

• whether they understood something in a way the assessment did not recognize;

• which forms of family or territorial knowledge were present;

• whether the system’s classification corresponds to their experience.

We can therefore formulate a principle together:

Every educational datum is a fragment produced through the encounter among a Body-Territory, a task, an instrument, an environment, and a question formulated by someone.

The datum is not necessarily false. But it does not speak by itself.

From third person to first person

The third-person perspective asks:

“What did we observe about the student?”

The first-person perspective asks:

“How did the student experience and understand what we observed?”

Between them, there is also a second-person perspective:

“What can we understand when student and educator interpret the phenomenon together?”

This relationship recalls the neurophenomenology developed by Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela. Rather than choosing between objective measurements and subjective experience, neurophenomenology proposes that physiological records and rigorous first-person descriptions can correct and enrich one another.

Andrea Vásquez-Rosati and colleagues emphasized in 2022 that this integration requires careful methods. It is not enough to place a subjective question beside a physiological curve. We need procedures that relate both dimensions without treating either as automatically superior.

In education, this could begin very simply.

The system reports:

“You interrupted the activity five times.”

The student responds:

“The platform froze twice. I had to help my younger brother, and I stopped again because I did not understand one of the words.”

Now we have more data, not fewer.

It matters what you think about your thoughts

A central sentence for this proposal is:

It matters what you think about other people, but what matters most is what you think about your own thoughts.

This is not an invitation to remain trapped inside ourselves. It is an invitation to investigate the place from which we are judging, deciding, fearing, or classifying.

When a thought appears, the student can learn to ask:

• Where did this thought come from?

• What was happening in my Body-Territory?

• What evidence supports it?

• What did it exclude?

• Is it a description, a fear, a habit, or a prediction?

• Do I still want to act from this thought?

Metacognition is not merely thinking more. It is becoming able to perceive what our thoughts are doing to the world we can see, inhabit, and create.

Metacognitive sovereignty

We call metacognitive sovereignty the right and the capacity to understand, contextualize, and contest the knowledge produced about one’s learning.

This does not mean the student always has the final interpretation. Educators, families, instruments, and assessments may notice aspects the student has not yet recognized.

But the student has access to something no sensor reaches directly: the experience of living that journey.

Metacognitive sovereignty allows the learner to ask:

• Where did this conclusion come from?

• Which data were used?

• What was not measured?

• Who am I being compared with?

• How uncertain is this prediction?

• Does the result consider my language and territory?

• Does this description correspond to what I experienced?

• What possible paths are available now?

Metacognition must not become internal surveillance. Its purpose is not to teach students to monitor themselves constantly so that they can produce more, obey better, or adapt silently.

It should provide tools through which they can recognize their learning strategies, bodily conditions, uncertainties, prior knowledge, and desired directions.

Paper, Rock, and Scissors as a first-person map

BrainLatam proposes Paper, Rock, and Scissors as an accessible metacognitive game. These are not three anatomically recognized connectomes or fixed personality types. They are provisional maps of functional states.

Rock appears when the Body-Territory prioritizes defense, speed, rigidity, escape, confrontation, or freezing. Rock can protect us, but remaining in Rock may prevent exploration when the threat has passed.

Scissors separates, compares, classifies, analyzes, and plans. It supports logic and critical reasoning, but may become rigid when it assumes that whatever cannot be classified does not exist.

Paper expands the surface of contact with the world. It favors listening, contemplation, proprioception, interoception, imagination, and belonging. Paper is not passivity; it is the ability to receive more of the event before cutting or confronting it.

The question is not:

“Which one are you?”

It is:

“Which mode seems to be organizing your response now, and what would help you move into another one?”

The student could compare this first-person perception with school data:

“The platform recorded a fast response. Was I in Scissors, analyzing efficiently, or in Rock, answering quickly because I felt threatened?”

The same behavioral result may emerge from very different Body-Territories.

A dashboard does not automatically produce consciousness

Latin America has expanded research in learning analytics, which uses educational data to understand and support learning. However, regional studies continue to identify difficulties involving infrastructure, data culture, professional training, interpretation, and regulation.

Research also indicates that digital traces do not automatically represent learning strategies or explain academic performance. Dashboards may show patterns, but their effects depend on design, context, human mediation, and whether students can transform information into meaningful action.

Showing a graph is not the same as producing consciousness.

We must ask:

Can the student recognize themselves in this representation and use it to choose their next movement?

A Map of the Present

Instead of a dashboard that defines who the student is, we can imagine a Map of the Present.

It would show:

What the data observed: participation patterns, knowledge already mobilized, recurring difficulties, and changes over time.

What the system does not know: family events, territorial experiences, emotions, intentions, and forms of knowledge that were never recorded.

What the student perceives: agreements, disagreements, feelings, strategies, and alternative explanations.

Which paths are available: people, resources, activities, and choices that could support the next movement.

The map should not say:

“You are inattentive.”

It could say:

“During the last activities, interruptions increased after a certain amount of time. We do not yet know why. What did you perceive?”

It should not declare:

“The algorithm predicts that you will fail.”

It could explain:

“The system identified a pattern associated with previous difficulties. This association is uncertain, depends on the available data, and does not determine your future.”

In a language that can be inhabited

For data to return meaningfully to students, they must be presented in a language compatible with their age, culture, sensory characteristics, and ways of expressing themselves.

Language is not merely the packaging of information. It influences who can recognize themselves within the explanation.

The Brazilian guidance on children’s data emphasizes accessible, clear, and age-appropriate communication. UNESCO’s AI framework likewise proposes that students understand the limits, risks, and possibilities of artificial intelligence while preserving human agency, critical judgment, cultural diversity, and creative participation.

Learning about data does not mean learning to obey the algorithm.

It means learning to speak with it, question its assumptions, and recognize when its representation cannot contain the totality of a Body-Territory.

Data must encounter those who produced them

In BrainLatam’s interpretation that Consciousness Is Spatial, third-person data describe a material or behavioral trace of an event. First-person consciousness reveals how that event found a place within the Body-Territory.

A graph can show that something changed.

Only the person can begin to describe how that change was lived.

Together, we can formulate the central idea:

Data become tools of freedom when they return to students, encounter their experience, and expand their capacity to perceive where they are, how they arrived there, and which worlds they wish to help create.

It is not enough to know more and more about students.

The NeuroEducation of Weichö asks:

How can each Body-Territory participate in the knowledge produced about itself without becoming imprisoned by that knowledge?

Commented references

Vásquez-Rosati, A. et al. (2022). Refining First-Person Methodologies for an Updated Neurophenomenology.
The article revisits Francisco Varela’s contribution and argues for more rigorous methods connecting first-person reports with physiological and neuroscientific data.

Hilliger, I.; Ceballos, H. G.; Maldonado-Mahauad, J.; Ferreira, R. (2024). Applications of Learning Analytics in Latin America.
The authors show that learning analytics is expanding in Latin America while still facing inequalities in infrastructure, regulation, professional training, and data culture.

Villalobos Díaz, E. et al. (2024). The Mediating Role of Learning Analytics.
The study shows that digital traces do not automatically represent learning strategies or explain academic performance on their own.

Kaliisa, R. et al. (2023/2024). Have Learning Analytics Dashboards Lived Up to the Hype?
The review concludes that educational dashboards have limited and inconsistent effects on achievement and motivation, emphasizing the importance of design and human mediation.

Alfredo, R. et al. (2023/2024). Human-Centred Learning Analytics and AI in Education.
The review finds that students and educators still participate too little in the design of systems that analyze their data and recommends stronger human control, safety, and co-creation.

Brazilian National Data Protection Authority — ANPD (2024). Processing Personal Data of Children and Adolescents.
The guidance reinforces children’s best interests, transparency, and the right to receive clear and appropriate explanations about the use of their data.

UNESCO (2024). AI Competency Framework for Students.
The framework proposes educating students to understand, evaluate, and creatively participate in AI systems while preserving human agency, ethics, rights, and cultural diversity.