Before We Design for Metacognition, We Need to Define What We Are Developing

Part of B Optimal’s series on learning practice:

Making Learning Practices Visible, Developable, and Actionable

Higher education already knows a great deal about designing strong learning experiences. Decades of research have emphasized the value of meaningful and authentic work, clear expectations, appropriate challenge, modeling, scaffolding, dialogue, feedback, reflection, self-assessment, and opportunities for learners to take increasing responsibility for their learning.

These practices matter. Many are also increasingly being brought together as ways to intentionally support students’ metacognitive development. That raises a more fundamental question: If we say an assignment, activity, or learning environment is designed to develop metacognition, what exactly should become different in the learner as a result?

The question matters because knowing how to create conditions that support learning is different from identifying precisely what learners need to become better able to do. If metacognitive development is the goal, we need clarity about both.

Before we design for metacognition, we need to define what we are developing.

Moving Metacognition From Theory Into Educational Practice

Metacognition has a substantial scholarly history. Flavell’s foundational work brought attention to knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena and to the monitoring of cognition. Subsequent scholarship has examined metacognitive knowledge, monitoring and control, regulation, strategy use, self-regulated learning, reflection, judgment, adaptation, and the ways learners direct their own learning across tasks and contexts (Flavell, 1979; Brown, 1987; Winne & Hadwin, 1998; Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters, & Afflerbach, 2006; Efklides, 2008; Zimmerman, 2002).

A growing challenge has been translating this extensive theoretical and empirical work into educational practice. A recent example is the Metacognition Design Framework developed by O’Neill, Fulton, Matthews, and Hensey (2026). Drawing on a substantial review of metacognition, learning design, self-regulated learning, and related research, the authors identify evidence-informed approaches for supporting metacognitive development and translate them into a practical framework for blended and virtual learning environments.

Their work represents an important effort to move metacognition from theory into educational design. Rather than leaving educators with the general recommendation to “develop metacognition,” the framework organizes established practices such as explicit strategy instruction, modeling metacognitive thinking, appropriate challenge, dialogue, scaffolding, reflection, feedback, and support for increasingly independent learning into a more deliberate design approach.

That is a useful move forward. It also surfaces a question that deserves greater attention: Before determining how we should design for metacognitive development, how precisely have we defined what we are trying to develop?

Good Design Principles Do Not Define the Capability

Explicit instruction can help learners develop. Modeling can help. Authentic challenge, scaffolding, dialogue, feedback, reflection, and opportunities for increasing independence can all contribute to stronger learning.

But notice what these principles primarily tell us. They tell us what educators might do and what conditions they might create. They do not, by themselves, tell us precisely what the learner needs to become capable of doing.

That creates a potential missing step in the design process. We can begin with the goal of developing metacognition, identify research-informed educational practices associated with metacognitive development, and then design assignments, activities, prompts, resources, and learning environments around those practices. Yet unless we have first specified the capabilities we intend to develop, an important question remains unanswered:

What exactly is supposed to change in the learner?

This provides a useful test for any approach to metacognitive design.

Imagine an assignment built around authentic work, clear expectations, modeling, scaffolding, dialogue, feedback, reflection, and self-assessment. Now remove the stated goal of “developing metacognition.”

How different would the assignment actually look?

In many cases, perhaps not very different.

That does not make the assignment ineffective. These are longstanding principles of strong educational practice for good reason. The issue is different.

If an assignment designed specifically for metacognitive development looks essentially the same as a well-designed assignment without that explicit purpose, we should ask what metacognition is actually contributing to the design. Answering that question requires greater precision about the learner capability being developed.

The Processes Are in the Literature, but They Are Dispersed

The difficulty is not that research has failed to identify the processes involved in metacognition and self-regulated learning. Across decades of scholarship, researchers have examined task understanding, planning, strategy selection, resource management, monitoring, judgment, control, adaptation, self-evaluation, and transfer (Brown, 1987; Winne & Hadwin, 1998; Zimmerman, 2002; Veenman et al., 2006; Efklides, 2008).

The difficulty is that these processes appear across different theories, terminology, and levels of abstraction. Practitioners are left with a broad mandate to “develop metacognition” without a shared, practice-level architecture for understanding exactly what learners need to become better able to do.

The challenge, then, is not discovering regulatory processes that scholarship has overlooked. It is organizing and specifying those processes at a level that makes them directly usable for understanding and developing learner capability.

Consider several students preparing for an important exam.

One misunderstands what the exam will actually require and prepares for the wrong kind of performance. Another understands the demands but chooses an ineffective study strategy. A third chooses an appropriate strategy but allocates too little time to use it effectively.

Another studies diligently but never notices that they cannot retrieve or apply what they believe they know. Still another recognizes that something is not working but incorrectly identifies the cause. Another accurately identifies the problem yet continues using the same approach.

All of these students could broadly be described as having difficulty with metacognition or self-regulation. But they do not have the same developmental need.

The first learner needs to become better at understanding what the task actually requires. The second needs greater capability in choosing approaches suited to those demands. The third needs to make better decisions about time and other resources. Another needs to become more capable of noticing meaningful evidence about learning. Another needs to interpret that evidence more accurately. Another needs to act on what has been learned and change course.

When these differences are collapsed into broad conclusions such as “the student needs better planning” or “the student needs stronger metacognitive skills,” we know something needs to improve without knowing precisely what needs to change. That lack of precision limits diagnosis, weakens the specificity of practitioner support, and makes it harder to design intentional opportunities for learners to develop the capability they actually need.

Cognition, Learning Activity, and Metacognition Are Not the Same Thing

Greater precision also requires distinguishing metacognition from cognition and from the learning activities surrounding it.

Students read, retrieve information, organize ideas, take notes, solve problems, integrate new knowledge with prior knowledge, participate in discussions, and complete assignments. These activities can contribute substantially to learning, but they are not automatically metacognitive.

Cognition involves the first-order processes through which learners perceive, understand, organize, retrieve, reason with, and apply information. Metacognition concerns the regulatory work through which learners direct, monitor, interpret, evaluate, and adapt cognition and learning activity.

The distinction becomes clearer in practice. A learner reading a difficult text is engaged in cognition. A learner who notices that comprehension has broken down, identifies what may be causing the problem, changes the approach, examines whether the change is working, and uses what was learned to approach a future text differently is engaging in metacognitive regulation.

The same distinction applies to educational activities intended to support metacognition.

A reflection assignment does not automatically produce meaningful evaluation. A self-assessment does not guarantee accurate monitoring or interpretation. Giving students choices does not necessarily develop their ability to select strategies intentionally. Providing feedback does not mean learners will correctly interpret what the feedback reveals or use it to make an effective adjustment.

The presence of an activity and the development of a capability are different things.

This is why the question cannot simply be, Does this assignment include reflection, self-assessment, feedback, or strategy instruction?

We also need to ask:

What metacognitive work will learners actually perform, and what will they become better able to do through that practice?

Start With What Learners Need to Become Capable of Doing

A different design sequence begins with the learner rather than the assignment.

Before asking what activity, prompt, scaffold, tool, or learning environment we should create, we can ask:

What does the learner need to become increasingly capable of doing?

This question builds on the learning-practice perspective developed more fully in Beyond Experiential Learning: Why Higher Education Needs a Metacognitive Model of Learning Practice. That article argues for shifting the unit of analysis from broad descriptions of learning or self-regulation to the particular regulatory work learners perform while engaged in authentic tasks.

The Metacognitive Moves Framework organizes that work through eight distinct but interconnected practices: Task Framing, Strategy Selection, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, Interpretation, Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer. These processes were not invented from an absence in the literature. Many of the underlying forms of regulatory activity have long appeared across metacognition, self-regulated learning, learning transfer, and related scholarship—including within established process models such as Winne and Hadwin’s (1998) COPES framework and Zimmerman’s (2002) cyclical model.

Those models were built to explain how regulation works. The Metacognitive Moves Framework is built for a different purpose: to give learners and practitioners a shared, practice-level vocabulary they can use directly to identify what a learner needs, design for its development, and recognize when it is becoming more capable.

The exam example shows why this distinction matters. What is often described broadly as a problem with planning may involve misunderstanding the task, selecting an unsuitable strategy, or allocating resources poorly. Difficulty during performance may involve failing to notice a problem, interpreting it inaccurately, or recognizing it without changing course. These are connected forms of regulation, but they are not interchangeable developmental needs.

Once the capability becomes visible, development becomes more precise.

Precision Changes What We Design

Suppose an educator wants an assignment to strengthen students’ metacognition.

A broad approach might add reflection questions, a self-assessment, feedback opportunities, or prompts asking students to think about their learning. Those additions may be useful.

A capability-focused approach begins one step earlier.

If the goal is to develop Task Framing, learners need more than clear assignment instructions. Clear instructions may actually do much of the framing work for them. Learners need opportunities to examine a situation, determine what is being asked, recognize explicit and implicit demands, surface assumptions, define successful performance, and revise their understanding when new information challenges their original frame.

If the goal is Strategy Selection, giving students a list of recommended strategies is not enough. Learners need opportunities to compare approaches, consider how task demands affect strategy choice, make an intentional selection, and examine the consequences.

If the goal is Monitoring, learners need opportunities to generate and notice meaningful evidence about their understanding, progress, or performance while there is still time to act. Monitoring alone, however, is insufficient. Learners also need to interpret what that evidence means.

A poor result might reflect insufficient knowledge, an ineffective strategy, misunderstanding of the task, inadequate resources, or misplaced effort. A learner can accurately notice that something is wrong and still make an ineffective decision because the cause has been interpreted incorrectly.

Only then can Adjustment become appropriately informed.

This is where defining the capability changes educational design. The question is no longer simply: How can we add metacognition to this assignment?

It becomes: What metacognitive practice can learners meaningfully exercise through this experience, and what would increasingly capable use of that practice look like?

That is a more actionable design question.

Reflection and Transfer Require the Same Precision

Reflection offers a useful example because it is frequently treated as evidence that an experience includes metacognition. Yet a reflection prompt does not tell us what kind of evaluative capability the learner is developing.

A learner may recount what happened, judge whether the outcome was successful, examine why an approach worked, reconsider the assumptions guiding the task, or identify what should change in a future situation. These responses represent different depths and functions of regulatory work.

Argyris and Schön’s (1978) distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning helps clarify the difference. Learners can adjust behavior within an existing frame, or they can examine and revise the assumptions governing the frame itself. A student who responds to poor performance by working longer may change behavior while leaving the underlying approach untouched. A student who recognizes that the task was misunderstood and redefines what successful performance requires is making a deeper regulatory change.

Simply requiring reflection does not guarantee either outcome. Design becomes stronger when educators know what kind of evaluative work the reflection is intended to support.

The same principle applies to transfer.

Transfer research has long demonstrated that learners do not automatically carry knowledge and strategies into new contexts simply because those resources would be useful there (Perkins & Salomon, 1992; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000).

A practice-level perspective treats Transfer as something learners become increasingly capable of doing. They must recognize what may be useful beyond the immediate experience, compare the demands of different contexts, decide what can be carried forward, adapt what no longer fits, and evaluate whether the transfer worked.

Specifying that capability changes transfer from a hoped-for consequence of learning into an intentional object of development.

From Good Instructional Design to Intentional Capability Development

Strong instructional design remains essential.Authentic work matters. Clear expectations matter. Appropriate challenge, modeling, scaffolding, dialogue, feedback, reflection, and well-designed learning environments all matter.

The question is what they are being used to develop.

Scaffolding, modeling, dialogue, feedback, reflection activities, and assignments are means. If metacognitive development is the goal, the capability those means are intended to strengthen must be identified.

This developmental orientation starts with the recognition that learners already bring ways of understanding tasks, selecting approaches, interpreting difficulty, and responding to outcomes. Those practices vary in their effectiveness, awareness, flexibility, and intentionality. Research suggests that many students enter higher education with limited metacognitive knowledge and skills and that learners vary in how accurately they judge their knowledge, understanding, and performance (Bjork, Dunlosky, & Kornell, 2013; Pintrich, 2002).

The challenge is therefore larger than exposing learners to strategies or placing them in environments where metacognition might occur. Development requires helping learners recognize what they are already doing, examine how well it is working, expand the approaches available to them, and assume increasing responsibility for directing and improving their learning.

This orientation is especially important when working with adult learners. Adults bring accumulated experience, established strategies, assumptions, strengths, responsibilities, and patterns of action into educational environments. Effective development engages those existing resources rather than treating the learner as an empty recipient of new strategies.

That changes the practitioner’s starting point.

Instead of beginning only with What should I teach, model, scaffold, or assign?, practitioners can examine what the learner currently does, where the regulatory process is functioning well, where it is breaking down, and what the learner needs to become better able to do.

A deliberate design sequence follows.

Begin by identifying the learning practice that needs development and clarifying what increasingly capable use of that practice looks like. Determine what learners are already doing and where development is needed. Identify an opportunity that requires learners to apply the practice, along with guidance that supports development without transferring ownership of the thinking to the practitioner (Azevedo & Hadwin, 2005; Tanner, 2012). Determine what evidence will indicate whether capability is developing.

Then design the assignment, activity, prompt, tool, conversation, or learning environment.

This sequence does not replace established principles of good educational design. It gives those principles a precise developmental target.

The growing attention to metacognition in higher education represents meaningful progress. The next step is to ensure that metacognition changes more than the language used to describe good teaching. It should change the precision with which we understand what learners are doing, what they need to develop, and how educational experiences can help them develop it.

That brings us back to the article’s central test.

If an assignment designed specifically for metacognitive development looks essentially the same as a well-designed assignment without that purpose, what is metacognition actually contributing to the design?

The answer should be visible in what learners become better able to do.

References

This article is intended as a thought piece rather than a comprehensive review of the literature. The references below represent key works informing the distinctions and arguments developed here.

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Addison-Wesley.

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass.

Azevedo, R., & Hadwin, A. F. (2005). Scaffolding self-regulated learning and metacognition—Implications for the design of computer-based scaffolds. Instructional Science, 33, 367–379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-005-1272-9

Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academies Press.

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). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Efklides, A. (2008). Metacognition: Defining its facets and levels of functioning in relation to self-regulation and co-regulation. European Psychologist, 13(4), 277–287.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911.

O’Neill, E. J., Fulton, C., Matthews, J., & Hensey, C. (2026). Metacognition design framework to aid metacognitive skill development in university students supported by the virtual learning environment. Educational Technology Research and Development, 74, 813–847.

Perkins, D. N., & Salomon, G. (1992). Transfer of learning. In T. Husén & T. N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of education (2nd ed.). Pergamon Press.

Pintrich, P. R. (2002). The role of metacognitive knowledge in learning, teaching, and assessing. Theory Into Practice, 41(4), 219–225. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_3

Schraw, G., Crippen, K. J., & Hartley, K. (2006). Promoting self-regulation in science education: Metacognition as part of a broader perspective on learning. Research in Science Education, 36, 111–139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-005-3917-8

Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113–120. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033

Veenman, M. V. J., Van Hout-Wolters, B. H. A. M., & Afflerbach, P. (2006). Metacognition and learning: Conceptual and methodological considerations. Metacognition and Learning, 1, 3–14.

Winne, P. H., & Hadwin, A. F. (1998). Studying as self-regulated learning. In D. J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 277–304). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64–70.

Related B Optimal Article

Bower, T. Beyond experiential learning: Why higher education needs a metacognitive model of learning practice. B Optimal Consulting.

Author’s Note

This article reflects B Optimal Consulting’s ongoing work to make the practices of learning more visible, actionable, and transferable across higher education. It builds on established scholarship in metacognition, self-regulated learning, learning transfer, adult learning, and instructional design. The Metacognitive Moves Framework and the broader Metacognitive Moves System represent B Optimal Consulting’s effort to synthesize and differentiate this regulatory work into a shared, practice-level architecture that learners and practitioners can use to understand, support, and strengthen learning within authentic contexts.