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A brief guide to some jargon

Ben Williamson, Futurelab

It was almost 30 years ago that the domain of education and learning was first introduced to the term 'metacognition'. The influential educational psychologist John Flavell is widely credited with popularising the term in a series of academic papers in the late 1970s, where he developed the argument that successful learning consists of being able to "think about thinking"[1].

Recently, however, the term has become so widely used that for some critics it is now muddled to the point of being meaningless. Popularly it is referred to as 'learning about learning' or as 'knowing how you learn'.

The DfES Thinking Skills glossary helpfully defines metacognition as, "The process of planning, assessing, and monitoring one's own thinking" and "thinking about thinking in order to develop understanding or self-regulation"[2].

In Flavell's original argument, metacognition refers to both the knowledge that a learner has about how she or he learns best, and the regulation of one's own learning experiences. Metacognitive knowledge can refer to learners' recognition of their general learning processes, their recognition of the demands of a particular task, as well as their recognition of which strategies are most appropriate during any given task. Metacognitive regulation, on the other hand, refers to being able to recognise when one has successfully completed a task, and, crucially, how it was completed.

But even Flavell acknowledges that distinguishing metacognition (thinking about thinking) from plain cognition (thinking) is not always straightforward. For example, what is the difference between cognition and metacognition when you know that you're not very good at learning physics? The distinction lies in how the learner uses the information they have about their own learning.

Metacognition often occurs when learners become aware that their cognition - their ability to comprehend something - has failed them, for example, not being able to understand some textual information or a mathematical formula, and that they have work to do to make sense of it.

The metacognitive act, then, would be interpreted as the learner's realisation, firstly, that there are limitations on their knowledge to complete a task, and, secondly, that they possess strategies for rectifying that situation. In the words of Guy Claxton, whose Building Learning Power program is now popular with many teachers, metacognition is about "knowing what to do when you don't know what to do"[3].

At least part of the confusion surrounding metacognition, and particularly in how you foster it, however, is that it is often couched in terms of 'higher order thinking' and 'self-regulated learning' - terms which, at least superficially, sound more suited to older learners with a well-developed cognitive repertoire than to young children whose cognition itself is still developing rapidly.

According to Claxton, though, it is quite possible for very young children to develop metacognitive skills. He provides an example of a 9 year-old child with a passion for adventure stories who is able not just to describe what she reads, but how she reads too. This is what Claxton describes as a sort of conscious reflection on one's learning processes - a process of deliberately reflecting on what it is one has achieved, and on thinking about what to do next.

Indeed, there are a number of published strategies for encouraging this kind of conscious metacognition. Some provide sets of questions that learners should be prompted to consider while planning, carrying out and evaluating their own work.

Before carrying out a task, for example, learners might want to ask themselves what prior knowledge will help them with it, what should they do first, and where do they want the task to take them - in other words, what are their objectives, and how do they plan on meeting them. During a task, they might ask themselves if they're on the right track, if they're using the right information and resources, and, most importantly, what should they do if they don't understand something. Finally, on completion of a task, they might ask how well they did, whether they feel they met their aims, and whether they need to go back and revise anything[4].

For Guy Claxton, conscious practice with these sorts of strategies can, in the course of time, lead learners to become almost unconsciously metacognitive - a position in which they are always reflecting on and evaluating the standards of their own thinking, learning, and strategies for personal development.

One of the reasons for seeing metacognition as increasingly important nearly 30 years after it was first coined in education is because we're just now approaching implementation of the new agenda of personalisation. The personalised approach to education, at its best, will see learners actively involved in planning and managing their own learning goals. The ability to reflect on what and how one has learned, and then to implement plans for self-development, will be key to learners' personal success.

Far from seeing metacognition as polysyllabic nonsense, then, educators need to be able to promote the young people in their care to become more reflective and self-evaluative, and to be able to recognise that when learning gets tough, they have strategies for tackling it.