Meaning & use
metacognition
Last updated
Meaning
noununcountabletechnicalspecialist
Awareness and understanding of your own thinking, including how you learn and solve problems.
Grammar: Uncountable: you say 'metacognition is important', not 'a metacognition' or 'metacognitions'.
Patterns
- develop metacognition
- metacognition in something
- use metacognition to do something
Good students use metacognition to notice when they do not understand a text.
The teacher asked the class to practice metacognition by explaining their own problem-solving steps.
Metacognition helps you choose the best study strategy for a test.
Common combinations
- develop metacognition
- Children develop metacognition as they learn to plan and check their work.
- metacognition in learning
- Metacognition in learning means thinking about how you study.
- improve metacognition
- Keeping a learning journal can improve metacognition.
- metacognitive skills
- Metacognitive skills include monitoring your own progress.
Synonyms and how they differ
- self-awareness
- A broader term for knowing your own mind and feelings; metacognition focuses on thinking and learning processes.
- reflection
- Reflection is looking back on what you did; metacognition can happen during the task as well.
Word family
- metacognitive adjective
- Relating to awareness and control of your own thinking.
- metacognitively adverb
- In a way that involves thinking about your own thinking.
Commonly confused: metacognition or cognition?
metacognition vs cognition
Cognition is thinking itself (memory, attention, reasoning); metacognition is thinking about that thinking.
Practice
Which sentence best shows metacognition?
Choose one answer.
Metacognition involves monitoring and evaluating your own thinking, as in option A. The other options show little or no self-awareness of the thinking process.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “metacognition”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.