Being Metacognitive About Metacognition

There is an irony at the center of much of the writing about metacognition: the concept is explained without necessarily being applied to the explanation itself. Writers define it, trace its history, describe planning, monitoring, and evaluation, and offer practical advice. Yet familiar definitions often pass through untouched, adjacent constructs blur together, and activities are labeled metacognitive without showing what makes them so.

The result is a gap between writing about metacognition and examining what we think we know about metacognition. That gap becomes more consequential as the term moves beyond research into education, professional practice, leadership development, executive coaching, consulting, HR, and workplace learning.

So the question is worth turning back on the field itself: Are we being metacognitive about what we think we know about metacognition?

Start with the definition

“Thinking about thinking” appears almost everywhere. It is memorable, accessible, and useful as shorthand. It is also too broad to carry the conceptual load placed on it. A person can think about a thought without monitoring cognition in relation to a task, just as a learner can recognize that something is going wrong without understanding what the evidence means or knowing how to respond.

The foundational literature describes something more specific. Flavell (1979) located metacognition in knowledge about cognition and the monitoring and regulation of cognitive activity. Nelson and Narens (1990) distinguished monitoring from control. Schraw and Moshman (1995) distinguished knowledge of cognition from regulation of cognition. These distinctions help establish boundaries around the construct rather than treating any awareness of thought as metacognition.

Once metacognition is reduced to “thinking about thinking,” those boundaries weaken. The shorthand becomes the concept, and familiarity begins to substitute for examination. The important questions then concern what our definition includes, what it leaves out, and whether we are carrying it forward because it adequately represents the construct or simply because it is familiar. A definition should open inquiry; too often, this one closes it.

Look at what the learner is actually doing

The limitations of broad language become clearer when we move from definitions to actual learning.

Consider a student who says, “I knew I was not understanding the reading.” The student has noticed something important, but that awareness tells us surprisingly little about what happens next. The learner still has to determine what is not understood, make sense of why understanding has broken down, decide whether the problem lies in the task or the approach, identify another strategy or resource, and eventually determine whether the response helped.

These are related forms of regulatory work, but they are not interchangeable. A learner can notice a problem and misinterpret what it means. The interpretation can be accurate without producing an effective adjustment. An adjustment can be made without evaluating whether it worked, and an experience can be evaluated thoughtfully without anything useful being carried into the next situation.

Broad terms can hide these differences. “Planning,” for example, may involve understanding what a task requires, selecting an appropriate strategy, and determining how time, effort, information, tools, and support will be used. Telling someone to “plan better” does not reveal which of those forms of work needs attention. Reflection presents a similar problem when looking back at an experience is treated as though it automatically includes interpreting what happened, evaluating its significance, and identifying what should be carried forward.

The practical consequence is that broad categories may identify an area of activity without revealing where learning is breaking down or what kind of support would help.

Related does not mean equivalent

The same problem appears when metacognition is associated with neighboring constructs. Reflection can provide an opportunity to examine cognition. Mindfulness can increase awareness of internal experience. Self-regulation includes forms of cognitive regulation alongside regulation of behavior, motivation, and emotion. Critical thinking, executive functioning, self-awareness, and other processes may interact with metacognition in meaningful ways.

Those relationships are worth examining precisely because the constructs are related rather than identical. Yet across psychology, education, learning science, and applied practice, those boundaries can become difficult to see. Reflection may be described as metacognitive simply because someone is looking back on an experience. Awareness of a thought or feeling may be treated as sufficient evidence of metacognition. A strategy that prompts deliberate thinking may acquire the metacognitive label without specifying what monitoring or regulation is occurring.

The label arrives before the analysis.

Asking what a person is actually doing metacognitively changes the conversation. It shifts attention from the name of an activity to the work occurring within it. Awareness may provide information that can subsequently be monitored or interpreted. Reflection may create conditions for evaluation or transfer. A question may prompt someone to examine an assumption or strategy. None of those relationships makes the initiating activity and metacognition synonymous.

This is not simply a problem created when research reaches popular or commercial audiences. Conceptual looseness can exist much closer to the construct itself. Broad definitions, overlapping terminology, differing theoretical traditions, and shorthand intended to make metacognition accessible can all contribute to ambiguity. Educational practice can then inherit that ambiguity when broad concepts are translated into prompts, strategies, instructional practices, interventions, and programs. Conceptual boundaries allow us to understand relationships among constructs without erasing the differences among them.

How constructs drift

Metacognition illustrates a broader problem in the movement of concepts from scholarship into practice and public discourse. A construct does not remain untouched as it travels. Researchers operationalize it differently. Educators translate it for learners. Practitioners turn it into activities and interventions. Writers simplify it for broader audiences. Other fields connect it to constructs already important within their own work. None of that is inherently problematic; constructs have to travel if they are going to be useful.

The difficulty arises when conceptual expansion outpaces conceptual discipline. A simplified definition becomes the working definition. An activity associated with a construct becomes treated as the construct itself. A related outcome is taken as evidence that the construct was present. Eventually, different people can use the same term while referring to substantially different phenomena.

Because metacognition is so often represented through the expansive shorthand “thinking about thinking,” this drift can occur easily: activities already associated with deliberate thought or self-examination can acquire the metacognitive label without much additional justification.

Construct drift can also occur without attaching metacognition to another practice. Sometimes the construct itself is expanded through claims about what it supposedly represents or enables. Metacognition becomes “the highest form of intelligence,” “the skill behind every skill,” or a prerequisite for capabilities such as critical thinking and adaptability. These formulations are memorable, but memorability is not evidence. They can turn a distinguishable dimension of cognition into a master construct that sits above, underneath, or inside nearly every desirable human capability.

This kind of elevation creates a different conceptual problem. Metacognition can contribute to how deliberately people develop, monitor, evaluate, and adapt many of their capabilities without therefore being those capabilities or being necessary for all instances of them. Its importance does not depend on making it the highest, deepest, or most foundational form of anything. When a construct has to explain nearly everything in order to demonstrate its value, its boundaries have already begun to disappear, affecting what researchers measure, what educators teach, what practitioners attempt to develop, and what organizations believe they are investing in.

When construct drift becomes buzzword use

Metacognition would hardly be the first useful concept to enter organizational discourse with a reasonably distinguishable meaning and emerge as a label for almost anything considered desirable.

Empowerment offers a familiar example. A concept concerned with power, authority, resources, participation, and meaningful control can become a general promise that people will feel confident, motivated, or encouraged to take ownership. Mindfulness can stretch across awareness, presence, focus, calmness, reflection, and emotional control. Growth mindset can be detached from beliefs about the malleability of ability and used to describe perseverance, positivity, openness to feedback, or willingness to learn. The concepts have not necessarily become meaningless; their rhetorical usefulness can begin to exceed their conceptual precision.

Metacognition fits that pattern unusually well. It sounds rigorous and research-grounded while “thinking about thinking” makes it broad enough to connect easily with leadership, self-awareness, adaptability, judgment, mindfulness, decision-making, resilience, intentionality, and performance. The scientific terminology can also lend authority and differentiation to an offering.

A related practice can then become a metacognitive practice. A familiar coaching technique becomes a metacognitive intervention. A broad developmental goal becomes metacognitive capability. The scientific term lends authority to the offering while the conceptual distinctions that give the term meaning become increasingly difficult to locate.

Consulting, leadership development, HR, and coaching can therefore be among the most egregious expressions of a problem that begins much further upstream. The incentives favor compression over qualification, immediate applicability over conceptual nuance, and memorable framing over careful boundary setting. The result can be a concept that appears to explain more and more precisely because less and less is required to qualify for the label.

None of this means metacognition has no legitimate place in leadership, coaching, or workplace development. It does. The question is whether the term identifies actual metacognitive processes or functions primarily as a more impressive label for reflection, self-awareness, intentional thought, better judgment, or another already-established capability.

The warning sign is conceptual expansion without corresponding discipline: the point at which the label begins doing more work than the mechanism underneath it.

Conceptualization comes before operationalization

This is where the problem moves from terminology to practice. Before a program, framework, course, tool, workshop, intervention, or coaching approach can reasonably claim to develop metacognition, there has to be sufficient clarity about what metacognition means and how the construct appears in actual activity.

Applied practitioners do not need to turn every intervention into an academic research project. They do, however, need enough conceptual precision to know what they are trying to develop. Otherwise, an activity can be called metacognitive because it asks people to think about their thinking, participation in that activity can be treated as evidence that metacognition occurred, and the existence of the activity can then be offered as evidence that the program develops metacognition.

The label validates itself.

Operationalization interrupts that circularity. It requires specifying what observable activity represents the construct, how that activity will be distinguished from related processes, and what evidence would support a claim that metacognitive capability has developed. The standard is not unnecessary academic precision. It is knowing whether the thing being developed is the thing being claimed, and that standard also applies to our own work.

What happened when we applied the standard ourselves

B Optimal’s work with metacognition began with a question closely related to the one this article is asking: What happens when we approach metacognition metacognitively? Rather than treating established categories as endpoints, we examined what learners actually have to do before, during, after, and across learning experiences and asked whether familiar language made that work sufficiently visible.

That examination did not require rejecting the established literature. It required working with it more closely. The question shifted from simply asking what metacognition is to asking what regulatory work learners actually perform when directing and improving learning. Broad categories such as planning, monitoring, reflection, and self-regulation remained useful, but closer examination showed that they could conceal meaningful differences in what learners were doing and where they might need support.

That process eventually produced eight distinctions: Task Framing, Strategy Selection, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, Interpretation, Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer. They are not eight steps in a fixed cycle. They distinguish forms of regulatory work that can interact, recur, and operate differently depending on the situation.

More interestingly, the process used to develop those distinctions mirrored the work they describe. We framed the problem differently, selected bodies of knowledge that could help us examine it, directed attention toward distinctions that appeared consequential, and monitored where familiar categories stopped explaining enough. We then interpreted what those limitations meant, adjusted the conceptualization, evaluated whether the resulting distinctions improved explanatory and practical usefulness, and considered whether they could transfer into actual learning contexts.

In that sense, the framework did not emerge from deciding that metacognition needed eight new labels. It emerged from subjecting our own understanding of metacognition to the kind of examination we believe the construct requires.

We used metacognition to examine metacognition.

That does not exempt our conceptualization from the standard we are applying to others. It subjects it to that standard. The distinctions should continue to be evaluated according to whether they clarify consequential forms of regulatory work, improve developmental practice, and withstand evidence that might require modification. Being metacognitive about metacognition therefore includes being metacognitive about our own framework.

Precision should change practice

Conceptual distinctions have limited value if they merely give practitioners more terminology to memorize. Their usefulness appears when they change what practitioners can see and what they can do.

“Plan better,” for example, can become a more precise conversation about whether a learner understands the task, has selected a suitable approach, or has realistically considered the time, information, tools, attention, and support the work requires. The same principle applies to broad instructions to monitor or reflect: greater precision helps identify the regulatory work the learner is actually performing and where support is needed.

That precision matters developmentally. Learners do not simply possess or lack metacognition. They can become more capable of recognizing what situations require, choosing approaches, using evidence to understand what is happening, making warranted adjustments, evaluating experience, and carrying learning into new situations. Developing that capability requires opportunities to do the work in meaningful contexts and feedback that addresses the underlying practice rather than relying on broad instructions to plan, monitor, or reflect.

The Metacognitive Moves System translates these distinctions into practice and is one way B Optimal helps institutions build Learning Practice Infrastructure in which learners encounter more consistent language, practices, and support across their learning experiences. That application follows the conceptual work; it is not evidence that the conceptualization is correct simply because we created a system around it. The same standard should apply everywhere metacognition is invoked.

A Thinker’s Guide to Metacognition

The practical implication is straightforward. When an article, research study, post, infographic, framework, program, or comment makes a claim about metacognition, the first task is not to accept or reject the claim. It is to examine it.

The conceptual tests developed throughout this article can be turned into a practical set of questions.

Ask:

1. How is metacognition being defined?Is there a conceptual definition, or only shorthand such as “thinking about thinking”?

   
   

2. What is the person actually doing metacognitively?Can the metacognitive activity be identified, or is the label being attached to an activity without explaining what makes it metacognitive?

   
   

3. Is metacognition being confused with a related construct?Is awareness, reflection, mindfulness, critical thinking, self-regulation, executive functioning, adaptability, or something else being treated as though it is metacognition?

   
   

4. How has the construct been operationalized?What observable activity or evidence is being used to represent metacognition?

   
   

5. Does the evidence support the claim being made?Does the evidence actually demonstrate metacognition, or is metacognition being inferred because people reflected, answered questions, used strategies, or reported greater awareness?

   
   

6. Is the claim larger than the construct can support?Watch for claims such as “the highest form of intelligence,” “the skill behind every skill,” or assertions that metacognition is necessary for critical thinking, adaptability, leadership, or other complex capabilities.

   
   

7. Is a metacognitive activity being mistaken for metacognitive capability?Completing a reflection, answering a prompt, pausing to think, or using a strategy does not by itself demonstrate that someone has developed metacognitive capability.

   
   

8. What would make you question the claim?What evidence, alternative explanation, conceptual distinction, or finding would require the author—and you—to revise the conclusion?

Before accepting the label, examine the construct underneath it.

Turn the construct back on the claim

These questions are not semantic. They determine whether a practice actually develops what it claims to develop and whether an explanation of metacognition adequately represents the construct it claims to explain. They apply equally to our own work.

The larger challenge is to keep metacognition from becoming another attractive label whose authority grows as its meaning becomes less precise. Before asking learners, leaders, practitioners, or professionals to become more metacognitive, we should be prepared to examine the construct with the same discipline we expect them to apply to their own thinking.

That is where being metacognitive about metacognition begins.

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References

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. https://www.neurodyspaca.org/IMG/pdf/flavell_-_1979_-_metacognition_and_cognitive_monitoring.pdf

Nelson, T. O., & Narens, L. (1990). Metamemory: A theoretical framework and new findings. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 26, pp. 125–173). Academic Press. https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~lnarens/1990/Nelson&Narens_Book_Chapter_1990.pdf

Schraw, G., & Moshman, D. (1995). Metacognitive theories. Educational Psychology Review, 7(4), 351–371. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=edpsychpapers

Author’s Note

Tim Bower is the co-founder of B Optimal Consulting with Dr. Janine Bower and a co-developer of the Metacognitive Moves System™. Trained as applied sociologists, they examine how metacognition is defined and differentiated, including the assumptions and distinctions that shape how the construct is understood. Their work focuses on translating learning science and applied social science into practical approaches that help learners develop greater capability in directing, examining, and improving their own learning.