Metacognition – Enhancing Learning By Understanding How We Think
Author: Dr Shen-Li Lee “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think” – Albert Einstein
Education is no longer just about teaching children the 3 R’s and a handful of other subjects. Aside from academic learning, we are also striving to develop our children so that they:
- have critical thinking skills to sort the facts from the fallacies in this age of information so they know how to think rather than what to think
- have an all-rounded development with exposure to sports, music, arts and drama
- are not only academically intelligent but also emotionally intelligent
- are gritty, mentally tough, resilient and persistent
- have growth mindsets as opposed to a fixed mindset
- are highly creative
In addition to these, we can also help them to become better learners by:
- teaching them effective study skills
- encouraging good practices that will maximize their learning potential
Recently, my children’s school had a talk to the parents about something else that will help our children become better learners – it’s called “metacognition”…
What is Metacognition?
An awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes – cognitive, emotional and motivational. It refers to higher order thinking that actively controls the cognitive processes engaged in learning.
- Thinking about thinking – monitoring our own thinking.
- Knowing about knowing – being aware of what you know.
- Cognitive self-management – planning, decision making, identifying problems and setting goals.
- Emotional self-management – knowing how to control our own emotions, how to show empathy, etc.
- Self evaluation – evaluating our own performance.
Why Do We Want Children to Develop Metacognition?
Metacognitive skills help children improve their learning – they can guide, regulate and evaluate their own learning. If they can identify the problem, what they know and what they don’t understand, they can actively direct their own learning. They can seek out new challenges for the work they find easy, and get help for the work they’re struggling with.
Metacognition helps them assess the problem, select appropriate strategies to deal with the problem and decide how they will handle the problem.
How Can We Help Children Develop Metacognition?
Have you ever noticed a child struggling in a corner over a problem and wondered why he didn’t ask for help when he was clearly out of his depth? Or why he keeps repeating the same methods for solving the problem when they clearly aren’t working for him? He may be so overwhelmed by the problem that he has tunnel-vision and he can no longer think of alternative solutions.
Students with the ability to recognize where they are at on the learning spectrum outlined below can take the appropriate measures to enhance and further their learning. While this might seem logical to us, it isn’t always the case for students lacking metacognitive skills.
Students can learn to gauge whether their learning is:
- New Learning – this is something new for me.
- Consolidated Learning – this is strengthening and clarifying my previous learning.
- Treading Water – This is something I already know.
- Drowning – I’m struggling with this and need clarification.
Strategies That Help Develop Metacognitive Abilities
Eleonora Louca provides the following strategies and ideas:
- encourage children to ‘think aloud’;
- focus attention on understanding the way they think and the problems they have to solve;
- ask not only for the results, but also for the procedure of thought and the strategy followed;
- teach strategies for overcoming difficulties;
- place each subject among its relevant ones and find connections among them;
- encourage the children to generate questions before, during and after the elaboration of a subject;
- help the children to perceive entities, connections, relations, similarities and differences;
- enable the children to become aware of the criteria for assessment.
Encourage students to be conscious of their thought process and to develop introspection:
- identify what they know and what they don’t know
- plan and organize their own strategies
- generate their own questions about the work they are involved in
- choose consciously by exploring the consequences of their choices and decisions, prior to the decision, during the act of deciding and after the decision
- set and pursue their own goals
- evaluate their way of thinking and acting
- identify the difficulty
- paraphrase and elaborate on their ideas
- label their behaviors
- debrief the thinking process at the end of the learning experience
- offer problem solving and research activities
- role playing, drama and “putting oneself into another’s shoes” helps students see things from a different perspective
- encourage thinking aloud
- provide interactive multimedia learning environments
- keep a thinking journal
- invite the children to teach other children through cooperative learning
- modeling the behaviors
- Encourage students to become more strategic thinkers by helping them focus on the ways they process information.
- Self-questioning, reflective journal writing, and discussing their thought processes with other learners are just a few ways to encourage learners to examine and develop their metacognitive processes.
For more information on metacognition, see
- Metacognition and Self-Regulation in James, Piaget,and Vygotsky
- Metacognition and Theory of Mind
- Concept and Instruction of Metacognition
- Metacognitive Fact Sheet
This article was originally published here on www.figure8.net