Monitoring and regulating your own thinking processes to improve learning, decision-making, and problem-solving, the skill of thinking about how you think.
Metacognition is the ability to step back from your own cognitive processes and observe them from the outside. It involves knowing what you know and do not know, choosing effective strategies for different tasks, monitoring your progress in real time, and adjusting your approach when something is not working. This skill underpins all other learning, from academic study to professional growth, because it turns experience into deliberate improvement.
You are encountering the concept that thinking itself can be observed and improved. You can pause after completing a task to consider whether your approach was effective. You start noticing habits like jumping to conclusions or avoiding difficult topics. You are learning to distinguish between feeling confident about an answer and actually knowing it, and you can name basic emotions that influence your decisions.
What Comes Next
If you've checked off most of this list, you're ready for the Reflective Learner stage, using structured reflection routines and deliberately choosing learning strategies. Kolb(1984)'s Experiential Learning Cycle suggests converting concrete thinking experiences into reflective observation, asking "why did I think that way?" to build your capacity for structured reflection.
Foundational framework defining metacognitive knowledge (person, task, strategy) and metacognitive regulation (planning, monitoring, evaluation). Provides academic authority for the metacognition field.
Science-based guide to spaced practice, interleaving, and self-testing strategies. Provides direct evidence for concrete learning strategy behavioral criteria in checklists.
5-level learning outcome structure (pre-structural to extended abstract) mapping qualitative development of observable learning outputs, providing additional evidence for metacognition level boundaries.
Seminal paper that first systematized the concept of metacognition. The four-component model of metacognitive knowledge (person, task, strategy), metacognitive experiences, goals, and strategies provides the theoretical foundation and scholarly authority for the metacognition competency level framework.
