Metacognition definition

Metacognition, a term coined by John H. Flavell (1976), is thinking about your own thinking.

But, what makes metacognition different from any other type of thinking?

Metacognition is an awareness of one’s abilities—what one does and does not know— and one’s ability to sort out problems, monitor, plan, control our mental processes, and evaluate learning gains.

So, metacognition encompasses awareness of the self and also the ability to manage our own learning and direct actions to achieve goals.

This means that metacognition includes two elements: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation.

Metacognitive knowledge

This consists of knowledge or beliefs accumulated through experience and stored in long-term memory that concern the human mind and its doings. It covers three categories: person, task, and strategy.

Metacognitive knowledge includes the learner’s knowledge of their cognitive abilities (e.g. I can’t work in a noisy place I need quietness to be more productive), the learner’s knowledge of the nature of particular tasks (e.g. I will take more time to read and comprehend a scientific text than reading and comprehending a novel), and the learner’s knowledge of different strategies including when to use these strategies (e.g. one good way to learn and retain information for me is to visualize it ) (Brown, 1987; Flavell, 1979).

So, metacognitive knowledge can be declarative ‘knowing that’ (the person’s ability and the nature of the task) as well as procedural ‘knowing how’ (the appropriate strategy).

Metacognitive regulation

Metacognitive regulation refers to adjustments individuals make to their processes to help control their learning, such as planning, information management strategies, comprehension monitoring, debugging strategies, and evaluation of progress and goals.

So, it is about how learners monitor and control their cognitive processes (use metacognitive strategies).

For example, a learner may use self-questioning to understand a text. So, to meet his/her cognitive goal (understanding the text), the learner may decide to go back and read the text to answer his/her generated questions and ensure comprehension is met.

So, metacognition allows people to take charge of their learning: organizing their learning process and using specific strategies to approach a task or ensure a goal is met. It encompasses both knowledge and abilities.

To explain more what metacognition is, it will be useful to reveal the difference between cognition and metacognition.

Difference between cognition and metacognition

Though the concepts of cognition and metacognition are different, they are related to each other.

Metacognition is necessary to understand how a task will be performed, while cognition is required to fulfill a task (Schraw, 2001).

What does this mean?

Metacognition is being aware of and knowing how one learns and should do to ensure that an overarching learning goal is being or has been reached.

Examples of metacognitive activities include planning how to approach a learning task, using appropriate skills and strategies to solve a problem, monitoring one’s own comprehension of text, self-assessing, and self-correcting in response to the self-assessment, evaluating progress toward the completion of a task, and becoming aware of learning needs and bumps.

That’s why it’s referred to as ‘thinking about thinking’: A self-reflection process.

Whereas, cognition is the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding. The aim is, for instance, to comprehend a text or solve a math problem. Cognition strategies include summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for memorization, retrieval practice, etc.

So, cognitive strategies are used to help an individual achieve a particular goal (ex. Understanding the text), while metacognitive strategies are used to ensure that the goal has been reached (ex. self-assessing one’s understanding of the text using self-questioning).

Therefore, metacognition is a basic requirement for cognitive effectiveness. Metacognitive activities occur before cognitive activities (planning), during activities (monitoring), or after activities (evaluating). They often occur when cognition fails (not understanding a text or writing coherent ideas, etc.)

For a better understanding of these major concepts, let’s discuss Nelson and Narens’ (1990) model of metacognition.

According to this model, there are two levels:

• The object level is where cognitive processes or ‘one’s thinking’ occurs. One example is decoding text when reading. At the object level, cognitive strategies (e.g. decoding) are used to help the learner achieve a particular goal (understanding the meaning of the text). This is cognition.
• The meta-level is where ‘thinking about thinking’ takes place. At this higher-order level, metacognitive strategies are used to make sure the learner reaches the goal they have set.

To continue with the reading example, the learner is thinking about how well they have understood the paragraph they have just read. This is termed monitoring.

If they are happy with their comprehension level they will continue reading. If not, they will perhaps re-read the paragraph, or decide to use a dictionary to help their understanding. These actions are called control processes, as they are changing the learner’s cognitive processes or related behaviours, based on the monitoring feedback. This is metacognition.

So, constructing understanding requires both cognitive and metacognitive elements. Cognition helps learners “construct knowledge” while metacognition helps them guide, regulate, and evaluate their learning.

To conclude,

Metacognition is individuals’ knowledge and awareness of thinking processes and the ability to monitor, regulate, and control their activities concerning learning (use strategies).

Thus, students with well-developed metacognition recognize their own cognitive abilities, direct their own learning, evaluate their performance, monitor their progress, identify their goals, and develop learning strategies.

References

Brown, A. L. (1987). Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation and other more mysterious mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert, & R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation and understanding (pp. 65–116). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Flavell, J. H. (1976). Metacognitive aspects of problem-solving. In L.B. Resnick (Ed.), The Nature of Intelligence (pp. 231-236). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911.

Nelson, T. and Narens, L. (1990). Metamemory: A theoretical framework and new findings. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 26, 125–173.

Schraw, G. (2001). “Promoting General Metacognitive Awareness”. In H. J. Hartman (Ed.). Metacognition in Learning and Instruction: Theory, Research, and Practice (pp.3-16). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.