Metacognition Is Not the Highest Form of Intelligence
- Tim Bower
- 12 hours ago
- 7 min read
You have probably seen the phrase: Metacognition is the highest form of intelligence. It sounds compelling because it elevates metacognition and signals that how people manage their thinking matters. But it also misclassifies what metacognition is.
Metacognition is not a higher-order version of intelligence. It is a distinct dimension of cognitive functioning concerned with knowing about, monitoring, and regulating cognition. Its importance comes not from where it sits in an imagined hierarchy, but from what it enables learners to do.
That distinction matters. When we describe metacognition inaccurately, we make it harder to understand what learners actually need to develop and harder to design learning environments that support that development.
Why the Claim Is Appealing
The phrase usually points toward a reasonable concern: cognitive ability alone does not determine how effectively someone learns, solves problems, or responds when an approach stops working. Learners also need to make sense of what a task requires, monitor how their approach is working, and adjust when the situation demands it.
A learner can have substantial cognitive capacity and still struggle with these demands. That is part of what makes metacognition so consequential. But describing it as the “highest form of intelligence” turns a relationship among different aspects of cognitive functioning into a hierarchy.
The research gives us a better way to understand that relationship.
Intelligence and Metacognition Are Different Constructs
Metacognition has long been treated as concerned with cognition itself rather than as a superior level of intelligence. In Flavell’s foundational work, metacognition included metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences and their relationship with cognitive goals, tasks, actions, and strategies. Later formulations continued to distinguish knowledge about cognition from the processes involved in monitoring and regulating cognition (Flavell, 1979; Schraw & Moshman, 1995).
Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters, and Afflerbach (2006) similarly describe metacognition in terms of knowledge about and regulation of cognitive activities in learning. Their review also highlights a continuing issue in the field: metacognition is a complex construct, and its terminology and conceptual boundaries have varied across theoretical traditions.
Research examining intellectual ability and metacognitive skill gives us another important part of the picture. Intelligence and metacognitive skill are related, but they do not make identical contributions to learning performance. Veenman, Wilhelm, and Beishuizen (2004), for example, found that metacognitive skills contributed to learning performance partly independently of intelligence. That finding gives us little reason to place metacognition above intelligence on a single scale. It points instead toward different contributions to how learning unfolds.
A second distinction helps explain why.
Cognition refers to the mental activity involved in doing the work: perceiving and processing information, remembering, reasoning, understanding, solving problems, and applying knowledge. Metacognition operates in relation to that cognitive activity by providing ways to monitor and regulate it.
Nelson and Narens (1990) gave this distinction a particularly useful formal structure. Their two-level model distinguishes an object level, where cognitive activity occurs, from a meta level, which contains a model of the object level. Information moves from the object level to the meta level through monitoring, while control moves in the other direction, allowing the meta level to modify activity at the object level.
Put more simply, cognition involves doing the cognitive work. Metacognition involves knowing about, monitoring, and regulating how that work is being carried out.
Consider a learner reading a difficult text. Reading, retrieving prior knowledge, interpreting sentences, and constructing meaning are cognitive activities. When the learner notices that comprehension has broken down, makes sense of what is causing the difficulty, and changes how they approach the text, metacognitive processes are at work.
This is why calling metacognition the “highest form of intelligence” is misleading. Metacognition is not intelligence at a higher rank. It performs a different function in relation to cognitive activity. We examine that fuller regulatory role in Metacognition Is More Than “Thinking About Your Thinking.”
The useful question, then, is not which construct ranks higher. It is what each helps us understand about learning and performance.
Metacognition Changes How Cognitive Activity Is Managed
A learner may be capable of complex reasoning and still misinterpret what a task requires, select an ineffective approach, fail to notice that comprehension is deteriorating, devote attention to the wrong problem, or continue using a strategy that is producing poor results.
Those difficulties do not necessarily indicate a lack of intelligence. They direct our attention toward how cognition is being understood, monitored, and regulated.
That is where metacognition becomes practically important. Developing metacognitive capability means becoming better able to manage these demands deliberately rather than simply relying on cognitive capacity to carry the work.
These demands influence how effectively learners use the cognitive resources available to them, but that does not make metacognition “higher” than intelligence. It makes metacognition consequential in a different way.
Precision Changes What We Can Do
The distinction becomes especially important when we move from describing learners to helping them develop. If metacognition is framed as an elevated form of intelligence, it can begin to sound like another cognitive quality that learners possess in greater or lesser amounts. A more precise understanding shifts the question from How metacognitive is this learner? to something much more useful:
What does this learner need to become capable of doing?
That question allows us to examine what is actually happening. Did the learner accurately interpret the task? Did they choose an approach that fit the demand? Were they monitoring information that could tell them whether the approach was working? Did they recognize that something needed to change? Could they identify the source of the problem and make an appropriate adjustment? What did they learn from the experience, and what can they carry into another situation?
Those questions provide a much stronger basis for support than a general judgment about whether someone is highly metacognitive. They help locate the demand, identify where difficulty is occurring, and determine what kind of practice, feedback, or support may help.
That developmental question is one we explore more fully in Before We Design for Metacognition, We Need to Define What We Are Developing.
The Difference Matters for Learners
Telling learners that metacognition is the highest form of intelligence gives them very little to act on. Helping them understand the metacognitive demands embedded in learning gives them something they can practice and develop.
That shift matters because it changes metacognition from a valued quality into capabilities that can be strengthened through use. Learners can become more deliberate in how they approach cognitive demands, more attentive to information about how their approach is working, and more capable of responding when change is needed.
Research on metacognitive instruction reinforces this developmental view. Schraw (1998) argued that metacognitive knowledge and regulation can be improved through instruction, while Stanton, Sebesta, and Dunlosky (2021) synthesized research showing how instructors can support students’ strategy use, monitoring, control, and other metacognitive processes.
The focus therefore shifts from possessing a valued cognitive quality to developing capability.
The Difference Matters for Those Who Support Learners
The same distinction matters for instructors, advisors, learning professionals, and others who help learners develop. Broad concepts often produce broad advice: be more reflective, pay attention to your thinking, take greater control of your learning, become more self-aware.
Each may point in a useful direction, but none tells us precisely what the learner needs to become better able to do.
A more operational understanding of metacognition allows support to become more precise. Instead of deciding that a learner simply lacks awareness or needs more control, we can identify the particular metacognitive demand involved, examine where the learner is having difficulty, and design support around that need.
That is the practical value of conceptual precision. It helps us move from naming metacognition to developing metacognitive capability.
The Difference Matters for Institutions
The institutional implications are equally important. If metacognition is framed as an elevated cognitive achievement, attention can drift toward recognizing learners who already appear to demonstrate it. If metacognitive capability can develop through repeated use, feedback, and support, a different institutional question becomes possible:
Where and how are learners being given opportunities to develop these capabilities?
That question reaches across curriculum, instruction, advising, student support, experiential learning, and career development. It also moves metacognition away from the margins of learning because the development of metacognitive capability depends on what learners are repeatedly asked to do and the support available as they do it.
Institutions therefore have a design problem as much as a learner-development problem. The challenge is to create conditions in which learners encounter meaningful metacognitive demands, receive appropriate support, and become increasingly capable of managing those demands for themselves.
Metacognition Does Not Need a Higher Rank
Calling metacognition the highest form of intelligence sounds like praise. But metacognition does not need to sit above intelligence to matter.
The research gives us a stronger claim. Intellectual ability and metacognitive skill make related but distinguishable contributions to learning, while theories of metacognition help explain how cognitive activity can itself become the object of monitoring and regulation. Metacognition matters because those processes influence how learners manage what they are doing, respond when an approach is not working, and adapt what they do next.
Its importance, then, comes from what it enables learners to do: manage cognitive demands more deliberately, respond more effectively when an approach is not working, learn from what occurred, and carry that learning into future situations.
That is more useful than a hierarchy because it gives us something we can develop.
The next time you encounter the claim that metacognition is the highest form of intelligence, replace the ranking with a better question:
What does metacognition enable a learner to do, and how are we helping them become capable of doing it?
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
Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26, 113–125.https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gregory-Schraw/publication/227166212_Promoting_General_Metacognitive_Awareness/links/5780446208ae69ab88241d39/Promoting-General-Metacognitive-Awareness.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
Stanton, J. D., Sebesta, A. J., & Dunlosky, J. (2021). Fostering metacognition to support student learning and performance. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 20(2), fe3.https://www.lifescied.org/doi/pdf/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0289
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.https://www.darshana-ganatra.com/files/Metacognition_and_Learning.pdf
Veenman, M. V. J., Wilhelm, P., & Beishuizen, J. J. (2004). The relation between intellectual and metacognitive skills from a developmental perspective. Learning and Instruction, 14(1), 89–109.https://www.academia.edu/download/42446806/The_relation_between_intellectual_and_me20160208-7077-132nrfe.pdf
Author’s Note
Tim Bower and Janine Bower are the co-founders of B Optimal Consulting and the developers of the Metacognitive Moves System™. Their work focuses on helping higher education institutions move from broad understandings of metacognition to more precise, practical approaches for developing metacognitive capability. Learn more at https://www.boptimalconsulting.com/.