Metacognition: What It Means and Why It Helps You Learn

Putting a name to a specific skill

According to Livingston (2003), metacognition is a “higher order” form of thinking that means actively controlling your own cognitive processes while you learn: planning how to approach a task, monitoring your own understanding, evaluating the progress you’ve made. The concept sits inside psychological science, the discipline that studies mental processes using the experimental method, and got a precise name in 1979 from psychologist John Flavell.

Almost everyone with average intelligence uses some form of metacognitive regulation when facing a demanding task, but some do it more than others. According to Livingston (2003), people with stronger metacognitive skills tend to do better at cognitive tasks, and the ability to regulate your own thinking can be learned.

Flavell’s two components

Flavell splits metacognition into two parts. The first is metacognitive knowledge, meaning what you know about your own way of learning: it breaks down into three categories, knowledge of yourself as a learner, knowledge of the task at hand, and knowledge of the strategies available. One example of knowledge about the “person” is knowing that you study better in a library, in silence, rather than at home with distractions.

The second part is metacognitive regulation, the practical use of that knowledge: the strategies a person deploys to control their own thinking and check whether a goal has been reached, such as understanding a text. Flavell also points out that, in practice, this knowledge can look much like ordinary cognitive knowledge - what changes is how it gets applied, either to reach a goal or to check whether it has been reached.

What it looks like while you study

One of the most cited examples of metacognitive regulation involves reading. Pausing to ask yourself questions about a paragraph you’ve just read, to check you really understood it, is, according to Livingston (2003), one of the most common comprehension-monitoring strategies.

Practical example: after reading a paragraph from a textbook, try closing the book and explaining it out loud, as if you were describing it to a classmate who hasn’t read it. If you get stuck on one specific point, that’s the part you haven’t understood - not the whole paragraph, just an isolated piece to go back to. It’s the same monitoring mechanism Livingston describes, applied to any chapter.

For a toolkit of concrete techniques to use while studying - how to pace your time, which diagrams to use, how to review material - the Recap on how to study effectively collects the ones backed by research. Here, the goal is understanding the mechanism that makes them work.

The regulation cycle: plan, monitor, evaluate

Metacognitive regulation follows a three-stage cycle, according to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF): plan how to approach a task, monitor the strategy while you work, and evaluate its success at the end. Metacognition can’t work on its own, though - it needs cognitive strategies already in place, and the motivation to apply them.

At what age it develops

It’s a common assumption that metacognition only concerns adults. Research cited by the EEF shows the opposite: children as young as three already do metacognitive things, like deciding on a goal for themselves and checking whether an idea has actually sunk in. Until about age eight, though, they tend to overestimate what they actually know - their self-assessment stays fairly inaccurate before gradually becoming more precise.

Theories that explain how children’s thinking changes with age, starting with Piaget and Vygotsky’s constructivism, offer the framework for placing this evidence on metacognitive development.

Why it matters for learning

The EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit puts metacognition and self-regulation approaches among its highest-impact, lowest-cost strategies, drawing on a wide body of international evidence. Several studies cited by the EEF find that self-regulated learning, and metacognition specifically, affects students’ school outcomes independently of what they already knew beforehand.

Some evidence suggests disadvantaged students use metacognitive strategies less often, which is why they may be the ones who benefit most from being taught these skills explicitly - not an innate ability, but something built through targeted support, as explored in the Recap on Jerome Bruner and teaching.

Not the same as self-regulated learning

Self-regulated learning is a broader concept than metacognition alone: it also covers behavioural, motivational and emotional aspects, beyond the cognitive and metacognitive ones, according to Panadero’s (2017) review. The distinction between the two fields, related as they are, traces back to the work of Zimmerman and Pintrich between the 1980s and 1990s.

Drawing on four meta-analyses on the topic, Panadero concludes that self-regulated learning interventions do improve student learning when well designed, but their effect varies by school level: according to the meta-analysis by Dignath and colleagues cited in the review, interventions grounded in social-cognitive theory - the same theory behind Albert Bandura’s work on social learning, with its emphasis on observation and self-efficacy - have a bigger impact in primary school, especially when teachers and students are given a structured framework to follow. Another meta-analysis by the same research group found that group work makes these interventions less effective in primary school, while it improves them in secondary school.