Metacognition is made up of two processes – monitoring and control.
- Monitoring involves the process of reflecting on your learning or knowledge (knowing what you know and what you don’t know).
- Control is the process in which your self-reflections guide your subsequent behaviour.
As Son (2025) notes, learning involves both of these processes. Accurate reflections are more likely to lead to appropriate behaviours, although this is not always guaranteed. If you know that you don’t understand a concept you can choose to obtain assistance or if you can’t remember a concept you can choose to practise further.
However, since self-reflection is a private activity, it can be difficult for teachers to know if a student has understood a concept or not. Many students are reluctant to raise their hand and admit that they have not understood or ask for clarification or just confirm that they have understood correctly. It is not until students are required to actively retrieve information that it becomes obvious to the teacher as to whether or not a concept has been understood. For example, from a literacy perspective, just because a student can read a particular text, does not mean they have understood the text at various levels of complexity.
It is important for teachers to support and give students opportunities to self-reflect during the learning process.
Some strategies to encourage students to accurately monitor their learning:
- Have students write their own questions. This is a particularly good strategy for developing comprehension skills.
- Ask students which part might be difficult to remember.
- Ask students to rate on a scale of 1-10 how confident they are that they will remember the concept being taught. The next week or session, students can be asked to retrieve the information and discuss how their level of success related to their prediction.
- Have students keep a journal reflecting on their learning (e.g., how many repetitions it took to remember a concept, what strategies they found effective for their learning, if mood, time of day or thought patterns had any impact, etc.).
- Help students recognise that failure is a normal and necessary component of successful learning.
- ‘Test’ (i.e., check knowledge) frequently in a non-competitive, non-graded, non-stressful manner.
- Have students teach a concept to someone else – it could be another student or a family member.
- Model and reflect on your own learning processes. It can be relevant to something you are currently learning or something you had difficulty learning years ago. It could be acknowledging particular words you found difficult to learn how to spell and strategies you used to help you remember. This information can be powerful in creating a shift in students’ approach to learning and making errors.
- Put a time limit on activities and especially homework. For example, you might expect students to complete a particular activity in say 15 minutes. If the student has worked on the activity for 15 minutes and it is not finished, they should be allowed to stop. This will provide great insight into whether or not students are understanding the concept. It also takes into account those students who have slow processing speeds or writing speeds or other difficulties.
Reference
Son, L. (2025). Metacognition: Monitoring, control and trusting in the self in P. Agarwal. Smart Teaching: Stronger Minds – Practical Tips from 10 Cognitive Scientists. Unleash Learning Press: Boston.