Metacognition: Definition, Strategies, & Skills

By Charlie Huntington, M. A., Ph. D. candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Metacognition can be defined as thinking about thinking, but there’s way more to it than that. This article defines metacognition and provides useful metacognition strategies and skills.
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If you are reading this article, you have probably tried meditating at some point in your life. So perhaps you can relate to the experience I commonly have in meditation, which is the moment when I realize that my mind has wandered. At first, I got down on myself for these moments – I was being a bad meditator, I thought – but over time, I came to recognize it as inevitable.
Psychologists have a name for the process of reflection I just described – metacognition. Blame it on our big brains – we don’t just think, but we are able to think about our thinking. This is one of the things that seems to distinguish us from virtually every other species on the planet. So, what exactly is metacognition, and how do we get better at using our metacognitive skills to run our lives more effectively? I hope this article can shed light on these key questions about metacognition.
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What Is Metacognition? (A Definition)

A simple definition of metacognition is that it is “thinking about thinking”. A more scholarly definition is that metacognition is our awareness and knowledge concerning our own thinking (Flavell, 1979). You are always thinking, but how aware are you of the content and patterns of your thinking? To the extent that you are aware of what is happening in your thinking, you are practicing metacognition.
 
Metacognition is a skill that begins to develop in childhood and continues to influence our development throughout our lives (Flavell, 1979). In fact, as I will discuss more below, our awareness of our own cognition plays a central role in how we learn. Think about it: if you had no awareness of your thinking patterns, would you be able to make the changes you need to approach a problem in a more effective way?
 
We are engaged in metacognition all the time, because we are not complete masters of our minds and often need to redirect our attention or change the way we focus on things. In this sense, there are two processes in metacognition – monitoring our thinking and controlling our thinking (Flavell, 1979). Most efforts to control our thinking can be thought of as falling under the umbrella of executive functioning skills (Carruthers, 2014). For example, try to imagine all the “thinking about thinking” skills that it requires to effectively listen to a college lecture and write down the “important stuff.” What information matters? What doesn’t? How is this related to what we’ve already learned? Is that the sort of information that was on the last test?

Metacognition vs Cognition

We can distinguish between metacognition and cognition by considering them as happening on two different levels (Nelson & Narens, 1990). I will use the example of “learning” to demonstrate these levels. When you read a text, you are decoding the words, considering how they are related to each other, and assigning meaning to the sentence based on what you’ve read. That is all thinking on the cognitive level. By contrast, the metacognition going on during your reading would be your processes of monitoring and controlling your reading. It’s the part of your thinking that might say, “Do I have enough time to finish this chapter before dinner?” or “I don’t think I really got the point of the previous paragraph – I should go back and reread it.”​

We can also think of the difference between cognition and metacognition as being the difference between performing a task and awareness of the nature of one’s performance. You cannot learn without cognition, but you cannot evaluate the effectiveness of your own learning without metacognition. When you tweak your studying process before your reading (for example, by intentionally choosing a different schedule or approach), during your reading (by noticing that you are getting distracted and choosing to take a quick break), and after your reading (by reflecting on the success of the overall process), you are engaged in metacognition.

Why Metacognition Is Important

Understanding metacognition is important for several reasons, chief among them is the fact that when awake, we are almost always engaged in metacognition (Flavell, 1979). Perhaps the reason so many people find meditation relaxing is that they experience periods without metacognition – time when they are not actively observing themselves, but simply having their experience.
 
Not only is metacognition a constant presence in our lives, but it is fundamental to making any and all adjustments in our lives. Without the ability to monitor and control our own thinking, we would have no cognitive flexibility (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009).
 
Here is a mildly embarrassing example from my own life. I have noticed (an act of metacognition) that when faced with a challenge or puzzle, there are often certain aspects of the situation that I inaccurately assume are unchangeable. For example, I recently spent a long time looking at a corner of my bedroom and wishing it was less crowded. When I shared my dilemma with a friend, she suggested I remove the ottoman that came with the chair in the corner. This was exactly the solution needed, but it had never occurred to me that I could separate the chair from its ottoman.​

I have come to appreciate that in problem-solving, I often have this kind of mental block. I now try to monitor my thinking in problem-solving and redirect myself to asking for help when I get stuck – these are metacognitive strategies that help me overcome my cognitive blind spot. To the extent that I am able to successfully monitor and control my thinking in such situations, I use metacognition to grow in my cognitive flexibility.

Examples of Metacognition

The story I just shared from my own life illustrates a classic example of metacognition – the ability to recognize when uncertainty exists or when our own knowledge is limited (Smith et al., 2003). I think this is an especially important metacognitive skill for people in positions of authority; I know that when students in my psychology classes have asked me a question which I cannot answer with certainty, I am often tempted to give my best guess as a response, even when I know the answer will be incomplete. It takes metacognition to monitor my own thinking and catch that impulse – “I don’t want to admit that I’m not sure, so I’m going to make something up”, control that impulse, and tell the student I’ll get them a full answer later.​

For really clear examples of metacognition that you can share with your friends, you can turn to the feeling-of-knowing (Hart, 1965) and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (Brown & McNeill, 1966). These are closely related forms of metacognition. The first is that sensation you might have when you see a person with whom you graduated from high school, ten years after the fact: you know you know this person, but you can’t say from where you know them. And you have probably had a tip-of-the-tongue moment yourself. For my part, I last experienced this on a hiking trip, where I spent over 36 hours wracking my brain to remember the name of a particular film that had come up in conversation but which nobody could name.

Here are a few more examples of when metacognition really matters (Rhodes, 2019):
  • When trying to decide how much to get your hopes up about receiving a particular job offer, you might ask yourself whether you are accurately remembering and interpreting everything that happened during the interview.
  • When providing feedback to somebody you supervise, you might consider whether there are any extenuating factors that influenced their behavior that you haven’t taken into account.
  • When a therapist meets with a client for the first time, they will typically monitor their approach to information-gathering, and likely change their style if they observe that the client is shutting down or giving minimal responses.

Metacognition Theory

While metacognition has been a topic of discussion in scholarly work since the time of Plato and Aristotle, it is only in the last seventy-five years that more systematic and in-depth theorizing about it has taken place (Flavell, 1979). It was in this period of time that some of the aspects of metacognition we have already covered became formally accepted, such as how it is different from cognition and how it consists of both monitoring our cognitions and controlling our cognitions.

Metacognition Strategies

When we are consciously using metacognition to be more effective out in the world, we are engaging in the use of metacognitive strategies (Efklides, 2011).

One essential metacognitive strategy – at least in the eyes of therapists like me – is the ability to monitor the relationship between one’s cognitions and one’s emotions and then intervene successfully to change one’s cognitions (Nelson et al., 1999). In fact, this kind of metacognitive strategy forms the backbone of much of modern psychotherapy.
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Let’s look at an example of this metacognitive strategy in action. Again, I’m going to draw on my own slightly embarrassing patterns of thinking and feeling. When I watch somebody else play the guitar, my brain often fills with negative, judgmental thoughts about that person. Why is that? It took me a while to recognize that those thoughts were related to feeling jealous: jealous because the other person was performing and I was merely a spectator, because they were more talented than me, because I saw how much positive attention they were receiving, etc. Once I could identify this link between judgmental thoughts and jealous feelings, I became able to intervene on my thinking in those moments. Now, when I watch somebody else play guitar, I direct myself to remember that we are different people with different backgrounds and skills.

We can look at most metacognitive strategies as falling into one of three categories (Dirkes, 1985):
  1. Connecting new information to things we already know—like when we put a friend’s recent grumpiness in the context of his having gotten a bad performance review at work.
  2. Selecting thinking strategies—like when I choose to apply a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset to my experience of learning a new instrument.
  3. Planning, monitoring, and evaluating thinking—like when I watch another guitarist perform having chosen to monitor myself for judgmental thoughts, then I reflect after the fact on how well my efforts to reframe went.

Metacognition Questions

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to practice metacognition:
  • “What might I not be considering right now?”
  • “What is my usual response in a situation like this? Could I do something different?”
  • “What information do I not have that would help me make this decision?”
  • “How do I know what I think I know right now? Can I be truly certain about this?”

Metacognition in Education

Since learning always involves new information or change, metacognition is central to all experiences in education (Flavell, 1979), whether the learning at hand involves active listening, reading, problem-solving, or social interactions. Learning how to harness one’s metacognition can help learners become more effective over time (Mahdavi, 2014); the more effectively they learn how to handle moments when their usual cognitive patterns won’t solve the problem, the better they will be at adjusting and growing. Metacognitive strategies in education include preparing to learn, picking strategies for learning, monitoring learning, adjusting strategies, and evaluating one’s process (Anderson, 2008). 
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This video offers some additional metacognitive strategies for effective learning:

Video: Metacognition: Learning about Learning

Articles Related to Metacognition

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Metacognition

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Metacognition

Metacognition is a critical component of self-awareness. We have all developed metacognitive skills with time, and we will hopefully continue to grow in these abilities with time. In fact, I think that one of the biggest determinants in personal growth is our willingness to examine our personal patterns of thinking and feeling. Only through metacognition do we realize how to change our patterns to become more effective problem-solvers.
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It can be very humbling to catch ourselves going through the same cognitive motions again and again; I hope that you can be gentle with yourself when you notice yourself stuck in a pattern of thought or at a loss for what to do next. Those moments are the perfect opportunities to engage in metacognitive strategies. There is no learning without stepping outside our usual patterns and pre-existing ways of thinking.

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