Metacognition - More Than “Thinking About Your Thinking”
Updated: 9 hours ago
Part of B Optimal’s series on learning practice:
Making Learning Practices Visible, Developable, and Actionable
You have heard it. You may have even said it yourself.
Metacognition is thinking about your thinking.
The phrase is useful because it makes a difficult idea immediately accessible. It gives people a way into metacognition without requiring them to first learn a body of theory.
But it is still shorthand.
John Flavell’s foundational work in the 1970s brought attention to people’s knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena, along with the monitoring and regulation of cognitive activity (Flavell, 1979). Later scholarship continued to examine and differentiate metacognitive activity involving planning, monitoring, strategy use, control, evaluation, and related processes through which learners direct learning (Panadero, 2017; Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters, & Afflerbach, 2006; Zimmerman, 2002).
That research tradition is much richer than the phrase “thinking about your thinking” suggests.
“Thinking about your thinking” tends to make metacognition sound primarily like awareness: stepping back from an experience, noticing something about how you thought, and perhaps reflecting on whether it worked. Awareness matters. Reflection matters. But they capture only part of what metacognition can involve.
Metacognition is our capacity to work on and with our own cognition and learning. We are being metacognitive when we engage that capacity—when our own cognition or learning becomes something we actively examine, interpret, direct, regulate, evaluate, or use to inform what happens next.
Seen this way, metacognition is not confined to reflection after an experience. It can matter before the work begins, while the work is unfolding, and after an experience has ended.
Metacognition Begins Before the Work
Before a learner starts preparing for an exam, completing a project, or responding to an unfamiliar situation, metacognition can already be at work.
A learner may need to examine what the situation actually requires. What matters? What would successful performance look like? Which demands deserve attention? The understanding they form becomes the frame through which later decisions are made.
They may also need to determine how to approach the work. Knowing several strategies is not the same as knowing which strategy fits the situation at hand. An approach that is useful for remembering information may be poorly suited to applying a concept, evaluating evidence, solving an unfamiliar problem, or creating something new. Choosing well requires judgment about the relationship between what the task demands and what a particular approach can accomplish.
Resources introduce another set of judgments. Time, effort, attention, information, and available support are limited. Learners may need to consider what the work requires and determine where those resources should be invested.
We describe these forms of metacognitive activity in the Metacognitive Moves Framework as Task Framing, Strategy Selection, and Resource Allocation. They are related, but they are not interchangeable.
A learner may understand the task but choose an ineffective approach. Another may select an appropriate strategy but devote too little time or attention to using it well. Someone else may work hard from the beginning while misunderstanding what the situation actually requires.
Calling all of this “thinking about your thinking” gives us too little language for seeing those differences.
Metacognition Continues While the Work Is Happening
Once a learner is engaged in the work, new information becomes available.
An explanation starts to break down. A solution no longer fits the problem. A project falls behind. Feedback conflicts with the learner’s own judgment. A strategy that seemed promising produces an unexpected result.
Something first has to be noticed. That is Monitoring. But noticing difficulty is not the same as understanding it. A learner may accurately recognize that something is going wrong and still misread the cause. The problem could be missing knowledge, but it could also be an ineffective strategy, a mistaken understanding of the task, inadequate resources, or misplaced effort.
Making sense of that evidence is Interpretation. The distinction matters because what learners do next depends on what they believe the evidence means. Someone who interprets difficulty as insufficient effort may simply work longer. That response could help. It could also deepen the problem if the real issue is that the strategy is wrong or the task was misunderstood.
Effective regulation therefore also requires Adjustment: deciding what, if anything, should change in response to what has been noticed and interpreted, and then continuing to examine whether the change is working.
These forms of activity can succeed or fail independently. A learner can monitor accurately and interpret poorly. They can interpret accurately and fail to adjust. They can adjust decisively in response to the wrong interpretation.
Metacognition during performance therefore involves more than noticing one’s thinking. It allows cognition and learning to remain available for examination and direction while the work itself is still unfolding.
Reflection Matters, but Retrospective Awareness Is Not the End
The familiar shorthand feels most natural after an experience. This is where learners are often asked to look back. What worked? What did not? What did you learn? What would you do differently?
Those questions can produce valuable insight. Learners can examine relationships between choices and outcomes, reconsider assumptions, and develop a clearer understanding of why something succeeded or failed. That work is part of Evaluation.
But understanding an experience does not guarantee that what was learned from it will matter the next time. This is where Transfer becomes important. Transfer requires learners to recognize that prior learning may be relevant to a new situation, determine what from the earlier experience is useful, notice where the new context differs, and adapt what they carry forward rather than reproduce it unchanged.
That is difficult because situations rarely announce themselves as repetitions of earlier learning. The next challenge may occur in another course, a workplace, or a problem that initially appears unrelated.
A learner can therefore write an insightful reflection, understand why an approach failed, and still repeat it later because the connection to the earlier experience is never recognized.
Evaluation helps learners make sense of what happened. Transfer concerns whether what they learned can become useful somewhere else.
Reflection matters. It simply is not the endpoint.
A Fuller Picture of Metacognition
These distinctions change what it means to develop metacognition.
The practices involved are interconnected, but they do not form a rigid sequence. Monitoring may reveal that the original task frame was wrong. A new interpretation may change which strategy makes sense or where resources should be placed. Evaluation may expose a problem that becomes important in a future situation. Transfer may reveal that something learned previously no longer fits the new context.
The Metacognitive Moves Framework makes these distinctions visible without turning them into a prescribed set of steps. Its purpose is to give us greater precision about what someone is actually doing when they are being metacognitive.
That precision matters for development.
Saying that a learner needs “better metacognition” tells us relatively little. A learner who is failing to notice evidence that an approach is not working has a different developmental need from someone who notices the evidence but misinterprets it. Both differ from a learner who understands the problem accurately but does not adjust.
Broad language can obscure those differences. Greater precision gives educators, coaches, and learners something more useful to recognize, examine, support, and develop.
That is also why B Optimal developed the Metacognitive Moves System: to make the different ways people can work on and with their cognition and learning more visible and actionable across contexts.
“Thinking about your thinking” might have helped make metacognition familiar.
A fuller understanding gives us something more useful: a way to see what people are actually doing when they are being metacognitive, where that activity can break down, and what might be developed.
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.
References
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906
Panadero, E. (2017). A review of self-regulated learning: Six models and four directions for research. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 422. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00422
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(1), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-006-6893-0
Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64–70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2
Author’s Note
This article is part of B Optimal Consulting’s ongoing work to make the practices involved in learning more visible, developable, and transferable. The regulatory processes discussed here have substantial foundations in scholarship on metacognition and self-regulated learning. B Optimal’s Metacognitive Moves Framework distinguishes eight interconnected practices—Task Framing, Strategy Selection, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, Interpretation, Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer. The broader Metacognitive Moves System is a Learning Practice System designed to support the development of these practices across learning environments.