Metacognition Is More Than “Thinking About Your Thinking”

You have heard it. You may have 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 regulatory work involving planning, monitoring, strategy use, control, evaluation, and related processes involved in directing 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.

The shorthand 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 metacognition also includes the decisions learners make before they begin, the judgments they make while work is unfolding, the changes they make in response to what they notice, and what they carry forward afterward.

In other words, metacognition is not simply something learners do about their thinking.

It is part of how they direct learning.

Metacognition Begins Before the Work

Before a learner starts preparing for an exam, completing a project, or responding to an unfamiliar situation, regulatory work has already begun.

The learner has to make sense of what the situation requires. They form some understanding of what matters, what successful performance would look like, and what demands deserve attention. That initial understanding becomes the frame through which later decisions are made.

The learner also has to decide 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. Strategy selection 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 decide where to invest them, whether deliberately or by habit. Those decisions often influence performance long before there is anything obvious to reflect on.

We describe these forms of regulatory work in the Metacognitive Moves Framework as Task Framing, Strategy Selection, and Resource Allocation. What matters is not simply the terminology. It is that these are different things learners can become better able to do.

These forms of regulatory work can break down in different places. A learner may understand the task but choose an ineffective approach, or select a sound strategy but devote too little time or attention to use it well. Another may work hard from the beginning while misunderstanding what the situation actually requires.

Calling all of this “thinking about your thinking” does not make those differences disappear. It simply gives us less language for seeing them.

Metacognition Continues While the Work Is Happening

Once a learner is engaged in the work, regulation does not stop.

Progress produces evidence. 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 a result the learner did not expect.

Something first has to be noticed. That is Monitoring. But noticing that something is wrong is not the same as understanding what is wrong. A learner may accurately recognize difficulty and still misread its 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, and 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 adjustment 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 should change in response to what has been noticed and interpreted, then continuing to examine whether that change is working. These processes are connected, but they are not interchangeable. 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.

Nor does regulation move forward in a neat sequence. Something noticed during performance may reveal that the original task frame was wrong. That new interpretation can change which strategy makes sense and where resources should be placed. The learner then produces new evidence that must itself be monitored.

Metacognition is therefore not best understood as a moment of stepping outside one’s thinking. It is an ongoing regulatory relationship with the work.

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 a learner can understand an experience extremely well and still fail to use what was learned the next time it matters. This is where Transfer becomes important.

Transfer asks the learner to do more than remember what happened. They have to recognize that prior learning may be relevant to a new situation, decide 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. What matters is whether the learner can recognize the connection and adapt appropriately.

This is why retrospective awareness should not be treated as the completion of metacognition.

A learner can write an insightful reflection and never use the insight again. They may know why an approach failed but repeat it when the next situation looks different enough that the earlier lesson is not retrieved.

Evaluation turns experience into learning about what happened. Transfer asks whether that learning can become useful somewhere else.

Both matter.

A Fuller Picture of Metacognition

Metacognition reaches across the learning process. Before action, learners frame situations, choose approaches, and allocate resources. During action, they monitor evidence, interpret what it means, and adjust in response. After action, they evaluate what happened and determine what should be carried forward and adapted.

These practices do not form a rigid sequence. They interact. Monitoring can lead back to Task Framing. Evaluation can reveal a strategy problem that matters in the future. Transfer can expose assumptions that no longer fit the new context. Regulation changes as the situation changes.

The Metacognitive Moves Framework organizes this work into eight interconnected practices: Task Framing, Strategy Selection, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, Interpretation, Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer. That learning-practice perspective is developed more fully in Beyond Experiential Learning: Why Higher Education Needs a Metacognitive Model of Learning Practice. The framework does not make metacognition more complicated than it already is.

It makes the complexity more visible.

That visibility matters because broad language can hide very different developmental needs. Saying that a learner needs “better metacognition” tells us relatively little. Saying that the learner is not noticing evidence that an approach is failing is different from saying they notice the evidence but misinterpret it. Both are different from understanding the problem accurately and still failing to change course.

The more precisely we can see what learners are doing, the more precisely we can support their development.

Why the Definition Matters

If “thinking about your thinking” were simply an informal introduction to metacognition, its limitations might not matter much. The problem is that it has come to function as a definition.

We should stop defining metacognition as “thinking about your thinking.”

The phrase is too narrow for the work it is being asked to do. Metacognition involves more than awareness of thought. As the preceding examples show, learners regulate learning before, during, and after action, and what they learn from one experience must still be recognized, adapted, and carried into another.

When an introductory shorthand becomes the working definition, our understanding of what learners need to develop becomes narrower as well. We examine the developmental implications of that problem more fully in Before We Design for Metacognition, We Need to Define What We Are Developing.

A more useful working conception is:

Metacognition is the regulatory work through which learners direct, monitor, interpret, adjust, evaluate, and carry their learning forward.

That conception is one reason B Optimal developed the Metacognitive Moves System. The system makes the regulatory work visible at a level that learners and practitioners can recognize, practice, and develop across contexts.

“Thinking about your thinking” might have helped make metacognition familiar.

What matters now, if we truly want to develop metacognition, is making the fuller regulatory work of learning visible.

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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

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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 organizes this work into eight interconnected practices—Task Framing, Strategy Selection, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, Interpretation, Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer—as part of the broader Metacognitive Moves System, a Learning Practice System designed to help institutions support their development across learning environments.