Why Eight?
Part of B Optimal’s series on learning practice:
Making Learning Practices Visible, Developable, and Actionable
When people encounter the Metacognitive Moves System™, one question comes up fairly quickly: Why eight?
The short answer is that we began with the ways metacognition had already been conceptualized across theory and research and asked a different question: Do the broad distinctions commonly used to describe metacognition give us enough resolution to identify and work with what someone is actually doing metacognitively?
In some cases, they did. In others, they did not.
The process of synthesis, conceptualization, and operationalization led us to eight.
Starting with what the field had already established
Metacognition has a substantial research history, but that history does not come from a single theoretical tradition examining the construct in exactly the same way. Different traditions have examined particular aspects of metacognition using different constructs, terminology, and methods.
Across that work, however, several broad forms of metacognitive activity have become familiar. Planning, monitoring, and evaluation appear repeatedly in frameworks concerned with metacognition and self-regulated learning. Regulation and control are represented in various ways as people respond to what they are learning about their cognition, performance, and progress.
Those contributions provided our starting point. We were not trying to replace decades of metacognition scholarship with an entirely new set of categories. We were trying to look across that scholarship, bring related contributions together, and determine what the activity represented within them allowed us to distinguish.
That synthesis was deeply collaborative. As we read across different traditions, we talked about what we were encountering constantly—at our desks, in the kitchen and living room, outside, in the garage, wherever the conversation happened to continue. One account would raise a question about another. A distinction from one tradition would sharpen something we had encountered elsewhere. We would question whether two constructs were actually describing different activity, whether one broad category was concealing several forms of activity, or whether something consequential was missing altogether.
Over time, those conversations became part of the method. Janine brought a grounding in theory and close attention to how people learn within educational settings. I brought a drive to clarify the concepts, test how they fit together, and work out what they would look like in practice. We both questioned assumptions, revised our thinking, and followed connections the other had surfaced. Janine pushed us to ask whether an idea held up in the complexity of real learning experiences; I pushed us to clarify how metacognitive activity could be operationalized. What emerged was not one person’s framework refined by the other, or one theoretical tradition extended outward, but a synthesis we developed together across them.
Our synthesis led us to five broad Metacognitive Domains:
Planning
Monitoring
Adjustment
Evaluation
Transfer
Planning, Monitoring, Adjustment, and Evaluation brought together broad territories of activity represented across existing theory and research. Transfer required a more deliberate decision.
Transfer certainly appears in the literature on learning and metacognition, but it is often treated as something that happens to learning, knowledge, strategies, or regulatory capability: whether what someone learned or developed in one situation transfers to another. It can also be incorporated into broader processes such as reflection or evaluation.
We saw consequential metacognitive activity that warranted being made explicit. A person can actively examine what they have learned about their own cognition, learning, strategies, or performance and determine what from that experience should inform another or future situation. That is something the person is doing on and with their learning. We therefore distinguished Transfer as a Domain in its own right.
But identifying five broad Domains did not finish the work. It created the next question.
Conceptualization that could be put to work
Our applied sociological perspective was important to what came next, but so were our years working in higher education. Our engagement with metacognition did not occur apart from practice. It was informed by years of working with learners, as learners, as educators, and learning professionals and by seeing the complexity of learning in actual educational settings.
That experience shaped the questions we brought to the conceptual work. It was not enough for a broad category to make sense theoretically. We wanted to know whether it gave us enough resolution to understand what someone was actually doing with their cognition and learning—and whether that understanding could be put to work.
Praxis was therefore integral to the development of MMS. We were not only seeking a stronger conceptual account of metacognition. We wanted an account precise enough to make metacognitive activity visible, recognizable and actionable in actual learning situations.
That required us to become explicit about what we meant by metacognition.
Metacognition is our capacity to work on and with our own cognition and learning—planning and directing it, monitoring and examining it, making sense of it, evaluating it, regulating and adjusting it, and determining how we might use what we learn in future situations.
Having that capacity and engaging it are not the same thing. When someone is being metacognitive, they are doing something to, with, or about their own cognition and learning in order to understand, direct, regulate, evaluate, or extend it. Their own cognition and learning become the object of activity.
That distinction made operationalization particularly important. A broad category can effectively describe an area of metacognitive activity while still being too broad to identify what someone is actually doing within it. If we wanted metacognition to become something that could be recognized, examined, supported, and developed in practice, we needed to distinguish the activity at a level that made that possible.
The question therefore became:
What is the person actually doing metacognitively?
Looking underneath Planning
Planning provides the clearest example of why that activity needed to be operationalized with greater precision.
A learner preparing for an exam might need to determine what the exam will actually require, decide which study approach is appropriate for those demands, and determine how to use available time, attention, materials, and support.
All three activities can reasonably be called planning. But they are not the same metacognitive work.
A learner might understand the demands of the exam accurately but select an ineffective strategy. Another might select an appropriate strategy but allocate too little time to use it effectively. Another might begin studying without having adequately determined what kind of knowledge or performance the exam will require.
If all three are simply described as having a problem with “planning,” consequential differences disappear. More importantly for operationalization, the broad category tells us less about what the learner is actually doing metacognitively, where difficulty may be occurring, and what might be examined or supported.
For the level of conceptual and practical resolution we were seeking, Planning needed to be differentiated into three broad Metacognitive Moves™:
Task Framing — working with what the task or situation requires.
Strategy Selection — working with how to approach those requirements.
Resource Allocation — working with how available resources should be directed and used.
The Domain remained Planning. But operationalizing the metacognitive activity within it required greater differentiation.
Monitoring presented a similar problem
Monitoring is central to many accounts of metacognition. But as we examined what was being represented under that broad concept, another consequential distinction became visible.
A person can examine what is happening in their cognition or learning without accurately determining what that information means.
A learner might recognize that they cannot retrieve material they thought they knew, that an approach is producing poor results, or that there is a mismatch between what they expected and what actually happened. But information about one's cognition or learning does not arrive with its meaning already attached.
The person may still need to determine why retrieval is failing, why an approach is not producing the expected learning, or what a discrepancy between expectation and performance indicates.
Those are related activities, but they are not identical.
This was also one of the places where our thinking changed through working together. I initially conceptualized the activity that follows from monitoring as diagnosis: determining what was going on. Janine pushed the idea further toward interpretation and meaning-making. That changed the distinction. The metacognitive activity was not simply diagnosing a problem; it involved making sense of what information about one's cognition or learning means.
That led us to distinguish two broad Moves:
Monitoring — examining what is happening in one's cognition and learning.
Interpretation — making sense of what that information means.
This distinction has become especially important in our conceptualization of metacognition because simply noticing confusion, feeling confident, remembering difficulty, or becoming aware of something about one's learning is not necessarily metacognitive activity. Those experiences can provide information for metacognition. Metacognitive activity occurs when a person takes their own cognition or learning as something they can actively examine, interpret, direct, regulate, evaluate, or use to inform what happens next.
Planning had therefore differentiated into three broad Moves and Monitoring into two. At the broad-Move level, our synthesis did not establish the same need to further differentiate Adjustment, Evaluation, or Transfer. Those remained both Domains and broad Moves.
That is how five Domains became eight Metacognitive Moves™.
The architecture was not designed for symmetry. We differentiated where doing so was conceptually consequential and necessary to operationalize metacognitive activity with useful precision. We did not add distinctions merely to create more Moves, nor stop at broader categories when they concealed consequentially different activity.
Distinctions, not steps
The eight Metacognitive Moves are not a sequence.
A person does not necessarily Frame a Task, Select a Strategy, Allocate Resources, Monitor, Interpret, Adjust, Evaluate, and Transfer in that order. Someone may interpret something they have monitored and return to Task Framing because they now understand the task differently. Monitoring may lead to Adjustment, which may prompt reconsideration of Strategy Selection. Evaluation may change how a person frames a similar task in the future.
The Moves therefore represent distinctions, not steps.
Their value comes from helping us identify what someone is doing metacognitively without imposing a sequence on activity that is responsive to the learner, the task, and the situation.
Greater resolution within the Moves
The eight Metacognitive Moves provide broad distinctions among forms of metacognitive activity, but greater resolution is possible within them. Continued examination of what someone might actually be doing within each Move led us to distinguish 23 more specific metacognitive moves.
The Metacognitive Wheel™ makes this architecture visible and usable: five Metacognitive Domains provide broad territories of metacognitive activity; eight broad Metacognitive Moves distinguish consequential forms of that activity; and 23 more specific moves provide additional resolution within them.
The questions associated with the 23 specific moves provide points of inquiry. They are not themselves metacognition or a script for producing it. They create opportunities for learners to examine and engage their own cognition and learning and for practitioners to prompt and support that examination.
The Professional Facilitator Edition of the Metacognitive Wheel is freely available to educators and learning professionals for non-commercial use within educational institutions. There is no cost and no signup required.
Open the Wheel. Put it to work.
So, why eight?
Because we did not begin by asking how many Metacognitive Moves™ there should be.
We began with what theory and research had already made visible, synthesized contributions across traditions, and then examined whether the broad categories gave us enough resolution to operationalize what people are actually doing metacognitively.
Planning did not, so Task Framing, Strategy Selection, and Resource Allocation became distinguishable Moves. Monitoring did not, so Monitoring and Interpretation became distinguishable Moves. Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer remained meaningful broad distinctions without further differentiation at that level.
Three, plus two, plus one, plus one, plus one. Eight.
Not because eight was the goal, but because eight was where our synthesis led when we distinguished and operationalized the consequential broad forms of metacognitive activity.
That is why eight.
Being Metacognitive About Metacognition explores the broader conceptual work behind MMS. Me Examining Me: Getting Underneath Metacognition goes further into the role of standpoint, assumptions, interpretation, and ways of knowing in metacognitive activity.
Author’s Note:
Why Eight? offers a window into the development of the Metacognitive Moves System™. The work behind MMS is considerably richer than can be captured in a single article. Here, we share an overview of our synthesis and interpretation of theory and research across metacognition and related traditions, along with some of the conceptual and operational work that led to the current architecture of MMS and the Metacognitive Wheel™.