METACOGNITION AND SCHEMA

Two important issues when learning or teaching literacy are metacognition and schema. Metacognition
is an awareness and understanding of one’s thinking and cognitive process. In other words
metacognition is thinking about thinking. Using metacognition for example one would ask themselves
what did I do wrong? Metacognition contains three parts consisting of creating a plan, supervising the
plan, and assessing the plan. Students need to ask themselves such questions when reading.

Schema in Greek means plan. It is a hypothesis for representation or a diagram or model. When
using schema one develops a mental picture of general concepts. Schema is background knowledge a
person acquires that becomes the basis of their comprehension.

Schema is important to teach because general concepts are essential in learning. Teaching
relates to metacognition because students must always be ready to improve. By evaluating a student’s
work prior to a preliminary assessment, the student gains more information for the matter at hand.
With more acquired information the student can then better prepare themselves for their
representation of schema.