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The concept and instruction of metacognition

Article  in  Teacher Development · March 2003

DOI: 10.1080/13664530300200184

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Teacher Development, Volume 7, Number 1, 2003

The Concept and Instruction

of Metacognition

ELEONORA PAPALEONTIOU-LOUCA
Frederick Institute of Technology, Cyprus

ABSTRACT Metacognition essentially means cognition about cognition. It refers to both

people’s awareness and control, not only of their cognitive processes, but of their
emotions and motivations as well. A number of strategies are described that teachers can
use to facilitate children’s metacognitive development and promote the monitoring and
regulation of their own cognitive enterprises. The educational benefits of the application
of metacognitive strategies such as self-awareness and self-monitoring include the
development of independent learners who control their own learning and learn how to
learn for life.

Introduction
Psychology in general and developmental psychology in particular are
presently awash in a ‘meta’ flood (metacognition, metamemory,
metaperception, metalanguage, and so on). It seems that these constructs
reflect a relatively new, stimulating and very attractive research perspective as
suggested by a number of review articles (Cavanaugh & Perlmutter, 1982;
Wellman, 1983; Schneider, 1985; Brown, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Flavell, 1999;
Hacker, n.d.) During the last 30 years metacognition has become one of the
major fields of cognitive developmental research. Research activity in
metacognition began with John Flavell, who is considered to be the ‘father of
the field’ and thereafter a considerable amount of empirical and theoretical
research dealing with metacognition can be registered. Moreover, a number of
strategies aiming to enhance children’s metacognitive abilities have been
suggested, which teachers through all educational levels can apply in their
instruction. Such strategies are set out in the relevant section of this article
dealing with the development of metacognition in practice and contribute to
both the promotion of critical thinking in education and staff development.

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
The Concept of Metacognition
‘Metacognition’ is a concept that has been used to refer to a variety of
epistemological processes. Metacognition essentially means cognition about
cognition; that is, it refers to second-order cognitions: thoughts about
thoughts, knowledge about knowledge or reflections about actions. So if
cognition involves perceiving, understanding, remembering, and so forth, then
metacognition involves thinking about one’s own perceiving, understanding,
remembering, etc. These various cognitions about cognitions can be labeled
‘metaperception’, ‘metacomprehension’ and ‘metamemory’ with
‘metacognition’ remaining the superordinate term.
Flavell (1978) referred to it as ‘knowledge that takes as its object or
regulates any aspect of any cognitive endeavor’ (p. 8). Moore (1982) defines it
as ‘an individual’s knowledge about various aspects of thinking’ and it has also
been described as ‘the abilities of individuals to adjust their cognitive activity in
order to promote more effective comprehension’ (Gavelek & Raphael, 1985,
pp. 22-23).
Gradually, the concept has been broadened to include anything
psychological, rather than just anything cognitive. For instance, if one has
knowledge or cognition about one’s own or someone else’s emotions or
motives, this can be considered metacognitive. In fact, the recent literature
completes the term by adding to its cognitive domain the emotional one –
referring to the emotions that accompany the cognitive processes and the
person’s ability to monitor them as well as the domain of cognitive habits
(Matsaggouras, 1994). Similarly, Flavell (1979), when trying to define the
concept of metacognition, refers to all those conscious cognitive or affective
experiences that accompany and pertain to an intellectual enterprise.
Moreover, a definition of ‘metacognition’ according to Paris & Winograd
(1990) ‘captures two essential features …: self-appraisal and self-management
of cognition’ (p. 17). Self-appraisals are people’s personal reflections about
their own knowledge states and abilities, and their affective states concerning
their knowledge, abilities, motivation, and characteristics as learners. Such
reflections answer questions about ‘what you know, how you think, and when
and why to apply knowledge strategies’ (Paris & Winograd, 1990, p. 17). Self-
management refers to ‘metacognition in action’, that is, mental processes that
help to ‘orchestrate aspects of problem solving’ including ‘the plans that
learners make before tackling a task’, ‘the adjustments they make as they
work’, and ‘the revisions they make afterwards’ (p. 18). It is important to note,
here, that ‘theoreticians seem unanimous – the most effective learners are self-
regulating’ (Butler & Winne, 1995, p. 245). Key to effective self-regulation is
accurate self-assessment of what is known or not known (Schoenfeld, 1987).
Only when students know the state of their own knowledge can they
effectively self-direct learning to the unknown.
Recently, the definition of metacognition has been broadened and
includes not only ‘thoughts about thoughts’ as it was previously considered,
but the following notions as well: knowledge of one’s knowledge, processes,

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

and cognitive and affective states; and the ability to consciously and
deliberately monitor and regulate one’s knowledge, processes, and cognitive
and affective states.
Although metacognition may turn out to be a fuzzy concept with
indistinct boundaries, key distinctions can be made and a scheme offered that
will be useful for organizing and assessing the experimental literature.
First, we can distinguish between knowledge and skills – between
‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’, the old distinction between theory and
practice, between competence and performance. One person may ‘know that’
they should distinguish relevant from irrelevant information in a problem, and
another person has the ability to do this in practice, perceiving what is relevant
in a ‘noisy’ environment. Similarly, one person may know that different
strategies can be applied in different problems, and another person has the
ability to select the suitable strategy, when needed, to resolve a problem.
Ann Brown (1987) distinguishes between knowledge about cognition,
and regulation of cognition. Knowledge about cognition can be ‘stable, stable
but fallible, or late developing’ information that human thinkers have about
their own cognitive processes, which usually remains relatively consistent
within individuals. Regulation, on the other hand, can be ‘relatively unstable,
rarely stable, and age independent’. Regulation of cognition refers to the
activities used to regulate and oversee learning. One may show self-regulatory
behavior in one situation but not another, and a child may show self-
regulatory behavior where an adult does not. Regulation may be also affected
by patterns of arousal (anxiety, fear, interest) and self-concept (self-esteem,
self-efficacy). These processes include planning activities (predicting outcomes,
scheduling strategies and various forms of vicarious trial and error, etc.) prior
to undertaking a problem; monitoring activities (monitoring, testing, revising,
and re-scheduling one’s strategies for learning) during learning; and checking
outcomes (evaluating the outcome of any strategic actions against criteria of
efficiency and effectiveness) at the end (Brown et al, 1983, in Flavell &
Markman, 1983).
Kluwe (1982) brought further definition to the concept of metacognition,
describing activities referred to as metacognitive: ‘(a) the thinking subject has
some knowledge about his own thinking and that of other persons; and (b) the
thinking subject may monitor and regulate the course of his own thinking, i.e.
may act as the causal agent of his own thinking’ (p. 202). Moreover, Kluwe
uses the term ‘executive processes’ to denote both monitoring and regulating
strategies. Executive monitoring processes involve one’s decisions that help: (a)
to identify the task on which one is currently working; (b) to check on current
progress of that work; (c) to evaluate that progress; and (d) to predict what the
outcome of that progress will be. Executive regulation processes are those that
are ‘directed at the regulation of the course of one’s own thinking’ (p. 212).
They involve one’s decisions that help (a) to allocate his or her resources to
the current task; (b) to determine the order of steps to be taken to complete

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
the task; and (c) to set the intensity or (d) the speed at which one should work
at the task (Hacker, n.d.)
Flavell (1981) makes a second important distinction between
metacognitive experiences and metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive
experiences are conscious feelings during some cognitive activity that relate to
the process – for example, during a communication task, feeling that you do or
do not understand; or feeling hesitant about the choice you have made.
Metacognitive knowledge, on the other hand, is described by Flavell (1981) as
‘that part of your accumulated world knowledge that has to do with people as
cognitive agents and their cognitive tasks, goals, actions and experiences’.
Some examples of this kind of metacognition are: when you are able to
describe your understanding of what goes on, to explain and recognize feelings
of uncertainty or confusion in some people, etc. (These distinctions will be
elaborated in detail, later in this article.)
Briefly, ‘metacognition’ refers to all processes about cognition, such as sensing
something about one’s own thinking, thinking about one’s thinking and responding to
one’s own thinking by monitoring and regulating it. As for whether the term
‘metacognitive’ should be used to describe thoughts that were once
metacognitive but have since become non-conscious and automatic remains a
debatable issue. Nevertheless, many researchers adopt a convention that
reserves the term ‘metacognitive’ for conscious and deliberate thoughts that
have as their object other thoughts (e.g. Bracewell, 1983; Paris & Winograd,
1990; Borkowski & Muthukrishna, 1992; Carr et al, 1994; Davidson et al, 1994).

Vygotsky as Precursor to Metacognitive Theory

According to Brown (1987), Vygotsky’s (1978) influence on metacognitive
theory has primarily been effected through his discussion of transference from
other-regulation to self-regulation. Basic to Vygotsky’s approach is the
assumption that social interaction plays a major role in the origin and
development of higher mental (e.g. metacognitive) functions. These functions
appear first on the interpsychological (i.e. social) plane and only later on the
intrapsychological (i.e. individual) plane. This means that a great deal of
learning occurs in the presence of, and is fostered by, the activity of others. So
many cognitive acts are initially experienced in social settings, but in time, the
results of such experiences become internalized. Initially, supportive others,
such as parents, teachers, peers, and so on, act as interrogators, leading the
child to more powerful rules and generalizations and guiding the novice to
mastery; and there seems to be a systematic regularity in how this guidance
works. The interrogative, regulatory role, however, becomes internalized
during the process of development and children become able to fulfill some of
these functions for themselves through self-regulation and self-interrogation.
To put it plainly, this process of internalization goes like this:
... first the adult (parent, teacher, etc.) controls and guides the child’s
activity, but gradually the adult and the child come to share the problem

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

solving functions, with the child taking initiative and the adult correcting
and guiding when s/he falters. Finally, the adult cedes control to the child
and functions primarily as a supportive and sympathetic audience. (Brown
& French, 1979, cited in Brown et al, 1983, p. 122)
In time, children become mature thinkers who provide conflict trials for
themselves, question their own basic assumptions, provide counterexamples
to their own rules, etc. In short, although a great deal of thinking and leading
may remain a social activity, through the process of internalization children
become capable of providing the supportive other role for themselves. In this
way, progressively, children learn not only how to get a particular task done
independently, but also how to set about learning new problems. In other
words, children learn how to learn. ‘Learning to learn’, of course, is not content-
free, neither does it refer to all learning, but it is specific to certain contexts.
It is important, however, to note here that metacognition is not equated
with learning or development, but the conscious and deliberate regulation of that
learning and development. Moreover, Vygotsky’s theory of language plays an
important role in thinking, mediating and directing the individual’s cognitive
endeavors. Together with this mediating role of language, Vygotsky’s
emphasis on social interactions stresses the sociocultural basis of self-
regulation and leads to the fourth metacognitive issue discussed by Brown
(1987): ‘the transference from other-regulation to self-regulation’ (pp. 88-103).
As to the question of how the individual eventually reaches both
reflective awareness (knowledge about cognition) and deliberate control of his
own cognition (regulation of cognition), Vygotsky’s theory (1986) focuses our
attention on verbalized self-observation (introspection). This implies that the
child perceives his own cognitive processes as meaningful. This view of a close
connection between knowledge about cognition and control of cognition is
made clearer in his study Mind in Society (1978).
What is apparent, however, is that many topics discussed in
contemporary metacognitive research are integral parts of Vygotsky’s (1978,
1986) theory of cognitive development; undoubtedly he pioneered an
approach to metacognition that cannot be easily disputed.

A Model of Cognitive Monitoring

According to Flavell (1979), the monitoring of a wide variety of cognitive
enterprises occurs through the actions and interactions among four classes of
phenomena:
a) metacognitive knowledge;
b) metacognitive experiences;
c) goals (or tasks);
d) actions (or strategies).

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
The first two have already been mentioned earlier, but will be analyzed in
detail below. As for the last two, Flavell states that goals (or tasks) refer to the
objectives of a cognitive enterprise, while actions (or strategies) refer to the
cognitions or other behaviors employed to achieve them.
Flavell’s (1981, p. 40) model of cognitive monitoring is illustrated in
Figure 1.

Figure 1. A model of cognitive monitoring. (Source: Flavell, 1981, p. 40.)

Let us now turn our attention to the analysis of metacognitive knowledge and
metacognitive experience, as proposed by their introducer, Flavell.

Metacognitive Knowledge
This refers to the segment of acquired world knowledge that has to do with
cognitive matters. It is the knowledge or beliefs accumulated through
experience and stored in long-term memory that concern the human mind and
its doings. Some of this stored knowledge is declarative (‘knowing that’) and
some of it is procedural (‘knowing how’), for example, your declarative
knowledge of how and when to supplement poor memory by the use of
shopping lists and other external memory aids (cf. Chi, 1984, in Flavell, 1985).
One’s knowledge of any given metacognitive item, could, of course, be both
declarative and procedural. For example, one might both know as a
verbalizable fact that writing a shopping list is a good memory strategy and
also ‘know how’ to write them on appropriate occasions.
As already made clear, metacognitive knowledge consists primarily of
knowledge or beliefs about what factors or variables act and interact to affect
the course and outcome of cognitive enterprises. These factors or variables fall
into three major categories: person, task and strategy.
The person category encompasses everything that you might believe about
the nature of yourself and other people as cognitive processors. It can be
further categorized into beliefs about intraindividual differences,
interindividual differences, and universals of cognition. An example of the first
subcategory would be one’s belief that one person remembers more easily

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than another; of the second, a belief that one can learn most things better by
listening than by reading; of the third subcategory, the ascertainment that we
usually forget many of the things we have learned as time passes.
The second category is knowledge of task variables. The individual learns
something about how the nature of the information encountered affects and
constrains how one should deal with it. An example would be the knowledge
that it is easier to learn the essence or gist of something, such as a story, than it
is to learn it verbatim.
Strategy variables are about what strategies are likely to be effective in
achieving which goals in which sorts of cognitive undertakings. A child may
come to believe, for example, that one good way to learn and retain
information is to pay particular attention to the main points and try to repeat
them to him/herself in his/her own words.
Finally, most metacognitive knowledge actually concerns interactions or
combinations among two or three of these three types of variables. To
illustrate a combination involving all three, one might believe that a pupil
(unlike his/her brother – person variable) should use strategy A (rather than
strategy B – strategy variable) in task X (as contrasted with task Y – task
variable) (Flavell, 1979, 1987).
Metacognitive knowledge can have a number of concrete and important
effects on the cognitive enterprises of children and adults. It can lead
somebody to select, evaluate, revise and abandon cognitive tasks, goals, and
strategies. Furthermore, it can lead to any of a wide variety of metacognitive
experiences and help us interpret the meaning and behavioral implications of
these metacognitive experiences.

Metacognitive Experiences
The other major conceptual entity in the taxonomy is metacognitive
experiences. Metacognitive experiences can be fully or less fully conscious and
verbalizable, brief or lengthy, simple or complex in context. What makes them
metacognitive experiences rather than experiences of another kind is that they
have to do with some cognitive (and often affective) endeavor or enterprise,
most frequently a current, ongoing one. For example, if one suddenly has the
anxious feeling that one does not understand something and wants and needs
to understand it, that feeling would be a metacognitive experience.
One is having a metacognitive experience whenever one has the feeling
that something is hard to perceive, comprehend, remember or solve; if there is
a feeling that one is far from the cognitive goal. Metacognitive experiences are
especially likely to occur in situations that stimulate a lot of careful, highly
conscious thinking, and provide many opportunities for thoughts and feelings
about your own thinking to arise. They may also occur at any time before,
during or after a cognitive endeavor; may be more apt to occur when the
cognitive situation is something between completely novel and completely
familiar; and when attentional and mnemonic resources are not wholly

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preempted by more urgent subjective experiences, such as pain, anxiety, or
depression. Thus, a metacognitive experience can be any kind of affective or
cognitive conscious experience that is pertinent to conduct in an ongoing
cognitive situation or enterprise (Flavell, 1979, 1987).
Metacognitive experiences can have very important effects on cognitive
goals or tasks, metacognitive knowledge and cognitive actions or strategies.
First, they can lead somebody to establish new goals or revise old ones.
Experiences of puzzlement or failure, for example, can have any of these
effects. Second, metacognitive experiences can affect one’s metacognitive
knowledge store by adding to it, deleting from it, or revising it, as in Piaget’s
(Nelson, 1992) model of assimilation and accommodation. Finally,
metacognitive experiences can activate strategies aimed at either cognitive or
metacognitive goals. As an example of the former, one senses (metacognitive
experience) that one does not yet know a certain chapter in a text well enough
to pass tomorrow’s exam, so one reads it through once more (the cognitive
goal here is to improve one’s knowledge). As an example of the latter, one
wonders (metacognitive experience) whether one understands the chapter
well enough to pass tomorrow’s exam, so one tries to find out by asking
oneself questions about it and noting how well one is able to answer them (the
metacognitive goal here is to assess one’s own knowledge).
Adding to the concept of metacognition, Efklides (2002) introduces
another aspect of it, one that serves the control of cognition, namely,
metacognitive skills. Since the components of metacognition serve the
monitoring rather than the control of cognition (Brown, 1978), one could refer
to this new aspect of metacognition as one which serves the control of
cognition. Metacognitive skills refer to conscious control processes such as
planning, monitoring of the progress of processing, effort allocation, strategy
use and regulation of cognition.
Before ending up with this model it must be noted that metacognitive
knowledge, metacognitive experiences and metacognitive skills form partially
overlapping sets. Some experiences have the same knowledge as their content
and some do not. Some knowledge may become conscious and comprise such
experiences and some may never do so.
Moreover, metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experiences and
metacognitive skills complement and enrich each other. For example, not only
does some kind of metacognitive knowledge seem to be needed for one to
interpret properly and act upon metacognitive experience, but conversely,
metacognitive experience also contributes information about persons, tasks,
and strategies to one’s developing store of metacognitive knowledge. The
ideas and feelings one experiences while watching or playing, say, tennis,
might contribute to the knowledge of tennis.
To put it simply, it seems likely that metacognitive knowledge,
metacognitive experience, and metacognitive skills are constantly informing
and eliciting one another during the course of a cognitive task.

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

The Development of Metacognition in Practice

If we wish to develop intelligent behavior as a significant outcome of
education, instructional strategies intended to develop children’s
metacognitive abilities must be infused into our teaching methods, staff
development, and supervisory processes (Costa, 1981, cited in Costa, 1987).
Metacognition, like everything else, undoubtedly develops with practice.
Interestingly though, direct instruction in metacognition may not be
beneficial. When strategies of problem solving are imposed rather than
generated by the students themselves, their performance may be impaired.
Conversely, when students experience the need for problem solving strategies,
induce their own, discuss them and practice them to a degree that they
become spontaneous and unconscious, their metacognition seems to improve
(Sternberg & Wagner, 1982, cited in Costa, 1987). The trick, therefore, is to
teach metacognitive skills without creating an even greater burden on
students’ ability to attend.
Although the strong focus of metacognitive research was initially on the
theoretical aspects of metacognition, recently an equally strong focus was
created regarding its educational application. Therefore, many researchers,
convinced of the educational relevance that metacognitive theory has for
teachers and students, are shifting their attention from the theoretical to the
practical, from the laboratory to the classroom. For example, Borkowski &
Muthukishna (1992) argue that metacognitive theory has ‘considerable
potential for aiding teachers as they strive to construct classroom
environments that focus on strategic learning that is both flexible and creative’
(p. 479); and Paris & Winograd (1990) argue that ‘students can enhance their
learning by becoming aware of their own thinking as they read, write and
solve problems in school. Teachers can promote this awareness directly by
informing students about effective problem solving strategies and discussing
cognitive and motivational characteristics of thinking’ (p. 15).
Teachers can use a variety of strategies to enhance metacognition,
independent of grade level and subject area, though the level of metacognitive
abilities varies with age and maturation. Koutselini (1991, pp. 52-53) suggests a
series of such strategies, which help students to become conscious of the way
in which they think.
Metacognitive abilities:
– encourage the student to ‘think aloud’;
– focus his/her attention on understanding the way she/he thinks and the
problems she/he has to solve;
– ask not only for the results, but also for the procedure of thought and
the strategy followed;
– teach strategies for overcoming difficulties;
– place each subject among its relevant ones and find connections among
them;

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
– encourage the student to generate questions before, during and after the
elaboration of a subject;
– help the student to perceive entities, connections, relations, similarities
and differences;
– enable the student to become aware of the criteria for assessment.
In their effort to promote metacognitive development in students, teachers
should also offer them opportunities for the fostering of metacognitive
experiences, which, in turn, will provide input to permanent metacognitive
knowledge.
Two important metacognitive experiences that have to be promoted are
consciousness and introspection. Teachers can engage children in cognitive
enterprises that should produce specifiable metacognitive ideas and feelings.
They can try to get them to attend to these ideas and feelings; to help them
understand their meanings and implications for subsequent cognitive action;
and to teach them how to generate metacognitive experiences, as well as to
respond appropriately to them. In communicative situations, students can
acquire self-control and monitoring when they keep exchanging roles as
speakers and listeners or when they have to analyze messages as cognitive
objects in order to understand each other, and so on. Research has also
proposed a range of various strategies aiming to develop children’s
metacognition and lead them to learn how to learn (Costa, 1987; Flavell, 1987;
Blakey & Spence, 1990; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Identifying ‘What You Know’ and ‘What You Don’t Know’

At the beginning of a research activity children need to make conscious
decisions about their knowledge. Initially children write ‘What I already know
about …’. As children research the topic, they will verify, clarify and expand,
or replace with more accurate information, each of their initial statements
(Blakey & Spence, 1990).

Planning and Organizing Strategy

Children must assume increasing responsibility for planning and regulating
their learning. It is difficult for learners to become self-directed when learning
is planned and monitored by someone else. Enhancing planning in children
would probably facilitate their metacognitive development and promote the
monitoring and regulation of one’s own cognitive enterprises. So, it is likely
that an individual who can create conscious explicit representations and
interrelate past, present and future actions should be in a better position to
acquire metacognitive knowledge. In schools, effective teachers are those who
engage in continual prompts to get children to plan and monitor their own
activities.

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

Children can be taught to make plans for learning activities including

time requirements, organizing materials, and scheduling procedures necessary
to complete an activity. Prior to any learning activity, teachers should point
out strategies and steps for tackling problems, rules to remember, and
directions to follow. Time constraints, purposes, and ground rules under
which students must operate should be identified and internalized. Making
these guidelines explicit helps students keep focused during the lesson and
enables them to evaluate their performance later (Costa, 1987; Blakey &
Spence, 1990; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Generating Questions
Almost by definition, learner-generated questions involve a high degree of
metacognitive involvement because the learner is acting independently in
monitoring and regulating his or her own comprehension. They actually serve
two important metacognitive functions: the monitoring of learners’ current
understanding and seeking of information in situations where the necessary
information is not available or part of their knowledge store. The ability to
determine the presence, absence, and completeness of information required
for one’s own individual comprehension is metacognitive in nature. By asking
their own questions, students frequently pause and think about whether, for
instance, they know main characters or events, if they are grasping the
concept, if they can relate it to what they already know, if they can give other
examples, and whether they can use the main idea to explain other ideas or
predict what may come next (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).
All these help students become more self-aware and take conscious
control of their own studying; and as is often said: ‘Teach somebody how to
ask questions and she or he will learn how to learn for the rest of his/her life’
(Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Choosing Consciously
Teachers can promote metacognition by helping students explore the
consequences of their choices and decisions, prior to the decision, during the
act of deciding and after the decision. Students will then be able to perceive
causal relationships among their choices, their actions, and the results they
achieve. Providing non-judgmental feedback to students about the effects of
their behaviors and decisions on others and on their environment helps them
become aware of their own behaviors (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos,
1997).

Setting and Pursuing Goals

Parents and teachers, in their effort to provide children with the metacognitive
assistance needed, can help them define their personal goals and justify their

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
reasons for their decisions, remind the child where she or he is with respect to
the goal, call his or her attention to relevant perceptual or conceptual facts and
arrange the environment in such a way that she or he can deal with each step
in the problem separately (Trilianos, 1997).

Evaluating the Way of Thinking and Acting

Teachers can enhance metacognition by helping students reflect upon and
evaluate their own thoughts and actions according to multiple criteria. Criteria
for evaluation can be firstly developed together with students, so they will
gradually learn to think and ask questions of themselves as they proceed
through a learning activity. An example would be to invite students to identify
their errors and to self-correct; to distinguish what was helpful in their effort to
reach their goal and what was hindering; what they liked and didn’t like; or
what were the pluses and minuses of the activity; also, to determine how
successful their work was; how time-consuming it was; how effective or
aesthetic the results were, etc.
Guided self-evaluation experiences can be introduced through individual
conferences and checklists focusing on thinking processes. Gradually, self-
evaluation will be applied more independently. As children recognize that
learning activities in different disciplines are similar, they will begin to transfer
learning strategies to new situations. Thus, students keep the criteria in mind,
apply them to multiple classification systems, and justify their reasons
accordingly (Costa, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos,
1997).

Identifying the Difficulty

Teachers can inform students that their excuses – ‘I can’t’; ‘I don’t know how
to ...’; or ‘I’m too slow to ...’ – are not the best way to get what they want.
Instead, students should be asked to identify what information is required,
what materials are needed, or what skills are lacking in their ability to perform
the desired behavior. This helps students identify the boundaries between
what they know and what they need to know. This, in turn, will develop a
preserving attitude and enhance the students’ ability to create strategies that
will produce the necessary data (Presseisen, 1984).

Paraphrasing and Elaborating Students’ Ideas

Teachers can also help their students to organize their thoughts by
paraphrasing what they are saying, extending their ideas, putting their
thoughts in some order, imposing, clarifying questions and so on. The teacher
can say, for example: ‘What you’re telling me is ...’; ‘What I hear in your plan
are the following steps ...’, etc. In this way, students learn gradually how to
organize their thoughts themselves, how to make explicit what they want to

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say in order to communicate effectively and at the same time they enhance
their level of thinking (Costa, 1987; Koutselini, 1995; Trilianos, 1997).

Labeling Students’ Behaviors

When teachers place labels on students’ cognitive processes, students become
conscious of their own actions. For example: ‘What I see you doing is making
out a plan of action for ...’; ‘What you are doing is called an experiment’;
‘You’re being very helpful to your friend by sharing your paints. That’s an
example of cooperation’ (Costa, 1987; Trilianos, 1997).

Debriefing the Thinking Process

Closure activities focus student discussion on the thinking processes to
develop awareness of strategies that can be applied to other learning
situations. A three-step method is useful. First, the teacher guides students to
review the activity, gathering data on thinking processes and feelings. Then,
the group classifies related ideas, identifying thinking strategies used. Finally,
they evaluate their success, discarding inappropriate strategies, identifying
those valuable for future use, and seeking promising alternative approaches
(Blakey & Spence, 1990).

Problem Solving and Research Activities

Problem solving and research activities in all subjects provide opportunities for
developing metacognitive strategies. Teachers need to focus student attention
on how tasks are accomplished. Process goals, in addition to content goals,
must be established and evaluated with students so that they discover that
understanding and transferring thinking processes improves learning.
Regardless of how much experience or knowledge a problem solver has,
each new problem situation is in some ways unique, requiring creative
application of strategies for posing, solving and resolving the problem at hand.
Reading, writing, and discussion are problem solving activities, and language is
an ideal subject in which to practice problem solving strategies, that is,
metacognitive skills.
Expert problem solvers and effective thinkers of all kinds are usually self-
aware thinkers. They plan strategies for tackling thinking problems. When
they hit blind alleys, they stop, analyze and reflect. Effective thinkers pose
alternatives for themselves and choose among them. Their abilities to reflect
on their thinking ‘as thinking’ and to analyze their own strategies are their
metacognitive skills (Blakey & Spence, 1990).

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
Role Playing
Role playing can promote metacognition because when students assume the
roles of other persons, they consciously maintain the attributes and
characteristics of that person. Dramatization serves as a hypothesis or
prediction of how that person would think, feel or react in a particular
situation. Taking on another role contributes to the reduction of egocentric
perceptions (Costa, 1987; Trilianos, 1997).

‘Thinking Aloud’
One of the most effective ways of helping students to organize and enhance
their thoughts is to invite them to ‘think aloud’ while they are working,
especially during problem solving processes. Talking about thinking is
important because students need a thinking vocabulary. Besides, inviting
students to describe their thinking (goals, plans, strategies, means to be used,
etc.), and explain their choices, seems to produce more thinking. This strategy,
as suggested by Vygotsky’s ‘egocentric speech’, not only facilitates thought
and accelerates the problem solving process, but also enables the individual to
induce more deliberate planning, helping the learning process, as well as the
transfer of the rules applied to similar situations (Brown, 1987; Garner, 1987;
Blakey & Spence, 1990).

Interactive Multimedia Learning Environments

Within an interactive multimedia program the metacognitive support
template is unique in that it aids students in their thinking, information
processing and monitoring of their own learning processes. Instructional
technology provides students with metacognitive support based upon a
constructivist epistemology. How we construct knowledge depends upon
what we already know, our previous experiences, how we have organized
those experiences into knowledge structures and the way we interpret the
world. Norman (1993, in Gordon, 1996) argues that ‘computers support
reflective thinking when they enable users to compose new knowledge by
adding new representations, modifying old ones and comparing the two’
(Gordon, 1996, p. 4).

Keeping a Thinking Journal

Another means of developing metacognition is through the use of a journal or
learning log. This is a diary in which students reflect upon their thinking, make
a note of their awareness of ambiguities and inconsistencies, and comment on
how they have dealt with difficulties. This journal is a diary of process (Costa,
1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Trilianos, 1997).

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

Children Teaching Children/Cooperative Learning

Teachers must be prepared to let students teach each other, for this strategy
seems to be in many ways beneficial to the learners; apart from the
collaboration that is fostered, students usually become not only more aware of
others’ thinking, but more aware of their own thinking as well. More
importantly, students who act as ‘tutors’ have to plan in speech what they are
going to teach and this very thing leads them to advanced and independent
learning.
For example, in a paired problem solving exercise, one student talks
through a problem, describing his or her thinking processes. A partner listens
and asks questions to help clarify thinking. Similarly, in reciprocal teaching
(Palinscar, Ogle, Jones, Carr & Ransom, all in Blakey & Spence, 1990), small
groups of students take turns playing teacher, asking questions, and clarifying
and summarizing the material being studied (Blakey & Spence, 1990;
Charalambous, 1999).

Modeling
Of all the instructional techniques suggested, the one which probably
influences most students is that of teacher modeling. During planning and
problem solving situations, teachers should think aloud so that the students
can follow demonstrating thinking processes. Since students learn best by
imitating the adults around them, the teacher who publicly demonstrates
metacognition will probably produce students who metacogitate. One way to
make strategy thinking public is for the teacher to render the covert cognitive
and metacognitive processes in overt form by thinking aloud while modeling
task completion. Some other indicators of teachers’ public metacognitive
behavior might be: sharing their planning, describing their goals and objectives
and giving reasons for their actions; seeking feedback and evaluation of their
actions from others; admitting they do not know an answer but designing
ways to produce one, and so on. Besides, modeling offers the vocabulary
students need for thinking and talking about their own thinking.
Metacognitive strategies are already in teachers’ repertoires. We must
become alert to these strategies, and consciously model them for students
(Costa, 1987; Blakey & Spence, 1990; Trilianos, 1997).
In the long run, all these strategies tend to develop self-awareness, self-
control and self-regulation; that is, they aim to make students independent
learners and enable them to learn how to learn:
Surprisingly, metacognitive awareness is not uniformly developed in
students. In reading, even college age students are unaware of how they
can approach texts, plan their studying, or work through problems that
have stumped them. In writing, inexpert writers follow one procedure
again and again without flexibility, even in the face of persistent failure.
However, teachers can promote awareness of strategies for thinking by

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 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
engaging their students in activities that require reflection. Students can
keep and share a ‘process log’ where they write about the processes they
employ in writing, reading, or problem solving generally. As students
share their entries, they gain an awareness of alternatives to their own
processes, and the teacher can direct them to consider specific strategies.
Teachers, as expert readers and writers, can also make their thinking
strategies explicit by ‘thinking-aloud’ with students as they read and write
together. Group work or discussion time can also regularly include a
‘process observer’, namely a participant who agrees to pay attention to
how the interaction progresses and to report to the group an analysis of its
process. Activities like these, that require students to make the sometimes
invisible work of thinking visible and explicit, help all students to
understand that as thinkers, they are in charge. (School Improvement in
Maryland, n.d.)
However, in order to reach the stage of self-regulation, according to Vygotsky,
the individual should be able to control his or her own cognition with the help
of inner speech, through the process of internalization. To reach this stage,
one has to experience first the stage of egocentric speech, which ‘serves mental
orientation, conscious understanding; it helps overcoming difficulties; it is
speech for oneself, intimately and usefully connected with the child’s thinking’
(Vygotsky, 1986, p. 228).
This is the reason why teachers at school should – and often do –
encourage students to think aloud; for talking to oneself not only facilitates
and organizes thinking, but also helps students internalize the principles they
verbalize and make them an integral part of their own cognition. There is
satisfactory evidence that language facilitates and enhances metacognition,
though the contrary is probably also true. This is apparent not only in the
thinking aloud strategy, but in other metacognitive strategies as well where
language is inevitably involved; such as generating questions by the learners,
justifying the choices and decisions one makes, describing the steps one
follows in a problem solving situation, identifying and correcting the errors
made, evaluating the process of thinking, the strategies followed and the
results, role playing activities and so on. This is also true in topics such as ‘oral
communication, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, writing, language
acquisition, problem solving, social cognition and various types of self-control
and self-instruction’ (Flavell, 1979, p. 906). In all these activities language is
being both fostered and developed, and at the same time, it is fostering such
abilities as self-awareness and self-control, that is, it develops metacognition.
This is also true in all those activities encouraged by schools where students
are asked to express their thoughts either orally or in writing.
Expressive talking and expressive writing require their producers to tap into
their memory, establish what they know, review the information they have
generated and translate it into inner or verbalized speech (or print), organize
main ideas into logical sequences, discover specific support for those main

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

ideas, construct a structural framework for communicating an intended

message and evaluate the product. All these activities involve considerable
practice and skill in cognitive monitoring and promote metacognitive activity.
Moreover, writing, though not a metacognitive experience itself, affords
practice and experience in metacognition, since the planning of sentences
requires metacognitive activity if you are writing about your thinking. It also
encourages the individual to imagine the thoughts of others, in his or her
effort to see whether they understand or believe what one is trying to convey
in one’s writing.
The same applies in dialogue and communication in general where both
listeners and speakers have to become skillful and critical, taking into account
not only the partner’s knowledge of the particular subject, but also his/her
intentions, comprehension, deficiencies and so on, and use language on the
basis of these inferences. These experiences can be characterized as
metacognitive.
The main assumption here seems to be that school offers a large field for
fostering metacognitive abilities; and in this effort, language seems to play a
major role, not only by providing the means or the vehicle for doing this, but
most importantly by being involved actively in this process and contributing
significantly in making students control their own learning.
In sum, we can say that metacognition is a useful tool in teachers’ hands,
for it facilitates their work and helps them to organize more systematically the
results of an effective learning. A brief reference to the educational
implications of the metacognitive strategies in practice will be considered
below.

Educational Implications of the

Application of Metacognitive Strategies
Metacognition is a ‘tool of wide application’ and its development gains
additional importance and interest because of this fact. As cognition comes
into play whenever we operate intellectually in any domain, the same can also
apply to metacognition. Thus, although metacognition can be construed as
domain-specific knowledge, it should be remembered that its ‘domain’ spans
all others (Flavell, 1985).
What is the particular usefulness and adaptiveness of metacognition?
According to Flavell (1987):
Metacognition is especially useful for a particular kind of organism, one
that has the following properties. First, the organism should obviously
tend to think a lot; by definition an abundance of metacognition
presupposes an abundance of cognition. Second, the organism should be
fallible and error-prone, and thus in need of careful monitoring and regulation.
Third, the organism should want to communicate, explain and justify its
thinking to other organisms as well as to itself; these activities clearly
require metacognition. Fourth, in order to survive and prosper, the

25
 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
organism should need to plan ahead and critically evaluate alternative plans.
Fifth, if it has to make weighty, carefully considered decisions, the organism
will require metacognitive skills. Finally, it should have a need or
proclivity for inferring and explaining psychological events in itself and
others, a penchant for engaging in those metacognitive acts termed social
cognition. Needless to say, human beings are organisms with just these
properties. (p. 27)
Flavell (1979) also states:
I find it hard to believe that children who do more cognitive monitoring
would not learn better both in and out of school than children who do
less. I also think that increasing the quantity and quality of children’s
metacognitive knowledge and monitoring skills through systematic
training may be feasible as well as desirable. (p. 910)
The above seems especially true, if we consider that students at school cannot
plan ahead, choose the right strategy every time to solve a particular task,
monitor and evaluate the acts and results of their work, and so on, unless they
have mastered some kind of metacognitive ability. More importantly,
metacognitive development leads students to independent learning, more
permanent knowledge, motivation for learning and higher achievement
(Koutselini, 1995) as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Components of the concept of metacognition. (Source: Koutselini, 1995, p. 51.)

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 CONCEPT AND INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITION

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, metacognition’s domain spans all

others. This very advantage allows the metacognitive processes to have a wide
application in a range of different situations. It is important, for example, that
basic strategies can apply in the metacognitive development of students
regardless of grade, level or subject area. It is also important that such
processes allow the learners to go far beyond the subject of instruction and
apply their learning in other, similar situations. Teachers may not maximize
their students’ potential if they tend to teach them only facts, rules or
principles, without teaching them how they can learn more about these or
about another content. Similarly, teaching is of little value if it simply asks
children to learn by heart some rules, without enabling them to reach
conclusions themselves and without helping them to transfer rules in real
situations, through problem solving. Such ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ is, at best,
limited, and has no breadth, since it does not help children become
independent learners, but links such learning to the particular situation in
which it occurred and nothing more.
On the other hand, expert thinkers are distinguished by the degree to
which they strategically plan, manage their time and resources, and monitor
their progress during intellectually demanding tasks. They demonstrate
metacognitive abilities, i.e. they think about, and direct their own thinking. In
this way, metacognitive strategies, by aiming to foster abilities such as self-
awareness, self-control and self-monitoring, produce independent learners
who control their own learning and learn how to learn for life.
Before ending this article, it is worth mentioning that metacognition has,
nowadays, expanded its application to a number of educational and other
enterprises. Many investigators (Flavell & Wellman, 1977; Markman, 1977;
Brown, 1978; Flavell 1978) have concluded that ‘metacognition plays an
important role and facilitates oral communication of information, oral
persuasion, oral comprehension, reading comprehension, writing, language
acquisition, attention, memory, problem solving, social cognition, and various
types of self-control and self-instruction; there are also clear indications that
ideas about metacognition are beginning to make contact with similar ideas in
the areas of social learning theory, cognitive behavior modification,
personality development and education’ (Flavell, 1979, p. 906).

Some Final Conclusions

The concept of metacognition has become one of the most attractive issues for
cognitively oriented instructional psychologists because it addresses two of its
major concerns: first, it goes to the very heart of the cognitivists’ assumption
of the learner as an active organism. It is individuals’ metacognitive knowledge
that enables them to behave in this way, taking an active part in the process of
learning; or to influence the input that in turn influences their activity. Second,
and related, the concept of metacognition addresses one of the perennial
problems of instruction – that of transfer or generalization of what has been

27
 Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca
learned. Besides, this is the great advantage of metacognition: it enables
learners to know what and how they know, and to apply this knowledge
across different settings, without having to relearn it, in every context.
In the 1980s, teaching for thinking (cognition) and its development was
presumably the most important educational discovery (Calfee, 1981, cited in
Koutselini, 1995). For the new century, metacognition has been an indicator of
the ‘educated intellect’ in which we place most of our expectations for
effective teaching and learning, and for the development of active, creative and
independent lifelong learners. This is what children require and is a pressing
need for the new century.

Correspondence
Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca, 4 Ag. Frangiskou-Assizis, CY-6050 Larnaca,
Cyprus (eleonoralouca@hotmail.com).

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