Metacognition

Definition

Metacognition means “thinking about cognition,” and given that cognition generally refers to the processes of thinking, metacognition means “thinking about thinking.” Metacognitive strategies are what people use to manage and understand their own thinking processes. Metacognition refers to knowledge about cognitive processes (“I'm bad at names”), monitoring of cognitive processes (“I'll remember that equation”), and control of cognitive processes (“Using flash cards works for me” or “I'll need to spend at least 2 hours studying this”).

Background

People are often in situations in which they are required to evaluate the contents of their memory. When people [Page 565]are approached on a busy street and are asked for directions, how do they know if they know the directions or not? When studying a list of items to be remembered, how do people know how much time they should spend studying each item for memorization? Furthermore, how do people know that they know the name of a movie they once saw, even though they cannot produce the name of the movie? These phenomena fall under the category of metacognition. Metacognition is a broad category of self-knowledge monitoring. Metamemory is a category of metacognition that refers to the act of knowing about what you remember.

Metacognition is generally implicated in the knowledge, monitoring, and controlling of retrieval and inference processes involved in the memory system. Knowledge refers to the evaluation of conscious experience. Monitoring refers to how one evaluates what one already knows (or does not know). Processes involved in metacognitive monitoring include ease of learning judgments, judgments of learning, feeling of knowing judgments, and confidence in retrieved answers. Metacognitive control includes learning strategies such as allocation of study time, termination of study, selection of memory search strategies, and decisions to terminate the search.

Metacognition involves the monitoring and control of what is called the meta-level and the object-level, with information flowing between each level. The meta-level is the conscious awareness of what is or is not in memory, whereas the object-level is the actual item in memory. The meta-level essentially creates a model of the object-level, giving people the sense of awareness of that object's existence in memory. Based on this meta-level model, people can quickly evaluate what they know or think they know so they can decide whether they should spend the effort trying to recall the information. An example of how the meta-level works might be the person being asked directions by a traveler. Before attempting to recall the directions, the person will determine if he or she even knows the directions before he or she begins to try to recall the specific directions. Once the meta-level evaluates the memory state of the object-level and determines that the directions are known, a search for specific details would follow.

Given that metacognition involves the memory system, it will be helpful to briefly review the processes of human memory. Memory proper can be divided into three separate processes: (1) acquisition, (2) retention, and (3) retrieval. Acquisition is how people get information in memory. Acquiring information could be reading a text passage, watching a movie, or talking to someone. The second stage, retention, refers to the maintenance of knowledge so that it is not forgotten or overwritten. The third and final stage is retrieval of the stored information. Retrieval, for example, might be the recall of the information (e.g., giving the traveler the directions) or the recognition of the information (e.g., marking the correct answer on a multiple choice test). Depending on which aspect of the memory stage is involved, different monitoring and control processes are involved.

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