How To: Metacognition
Metacognition is an essential practice for student success. Metacognition helps students develop the skills to recognize how and what they know and how they can learn better. Instruction in and practice of metacognition improves student learning. It’s also a transposable skill: when they learn to practice in your class, they can deploy it in all their other classes.
Practicing metacognition places the emphasis on process rather than outcomes, helps students get comfortable with taking risks and promotes thinking intentionally – consciously – about the practice of learning. This short video from Cambridge explains the research. Additional information is available on this page.
Helping students learn to practice metacognition can include asking students to:
- Make intentional statements about their thinking and learning, “I’ve struggled with this material. I’m going to try reading the text without listening to music to see if I can focus better.” “Last time the professor asked us to design a prototype, I used a drawing program, but this time, I want to try sketching it by hand.”
- Engage in self-interrogations, e.g., “What is it I have to do and how do I think I should go about it?” “What did I do and how did I do?” “What worked and what didn’t work for me in this exercise and what could I have changed?” “How was I feeling when I started and how did that affect my learning and engagement?”
- Practice self-reinforcements, e.g., ‘Good, I’m doing fine.” “That was a struggle but I did it.” “That wasn’t as difficult as I expected.”
- Employ coping remarks, e.g., “ Well, I messed that up, but look what I learned in the process.”
There are three important steps in the metacognitive process:
- Plan, by selecting appropriate learning strategies, e.g., choosing to write down what you think are the important points during a discussion and then deciding to review and organize them by theme; choosing to highlight key points in the reading before going to the class.
- Monitor what’s happening during your learning processes, e.g., “My mind keeps wandering watching this video” or “I’m having a lot of trouble following this text” or “I better remember to review my notes in case there’s their usual pop quiz.”
- Evaluating how a learning strategy is working, e.g., assessing whether different learning strategies are helping. Asking yourself, “Did explaining the class discussion to my roommate make it easier to recall the main points of the discussion the next day?” is one way to think about assessing the effectiveness of different learning strategies for different situations, and consider what changes need to be made.
Faculty can support students’ development of metacognitive practices by:
- Asking students to keep a metacognitive journal. Here are prompts they can use.
- Promoting metacognitive activities in class, e.g., “Take two minutes and write down what was confusing for you during that discussion and why do you think it was,” then pair them up to share and then report back what they learned about themselves and each other.
- Sharing your own thinking: show students how you think procedurally in approaching a situation or problem or issue: how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you evaluate your strategies, how you check yourself and your work, and how you know when you’re done.
- View this 30-minute video by Katayoun Chamany and the slides she used to present on how she supports first year students through metacognition and asks them to keep a metacognitive journal. These are examples of prompts she uses.
And it’s not just for your students!
Think about how you think about teaching. Developing a metacognitive approach to your teaching is a natural entry point to interactive change in your teaching practices. This is an essential component of transparent teaching:
- Why do you make the instructional decisions you do?
- What do you know about how students learn? What assumptions do you make about your students and
- What evidence do you really have to support those assumptions?
Here are sample questions to prompt metacognition about teaching.
Tips for Students
Ask yourself:
- What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning today?
- What was most confusing to me about the materials we covered in class today?
- Recognize how you’ve learned: Ask yourself how you used to think about something and how what you’ve learned has changed that.
- Keep a journal: these are suggested questions to ask yourself for different types of learning activities.
- Pay attention to where you are, what you’re listening to, whether you’ve eaten, how you’re feeling and consider how that might affect learning.
This short video articulates the importance of and steps in the metacognitive process.