Prof Ed 6
Prof Ed 6
Prof Ed 6
OBJECTIVES
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
explain the meaning of metacognition and metacognitive knowledge;
determine metacognitive knowledge required in a specific competency; and
apply concepts learned in assessing your work and other's output.
THINK
Definition of Metacognition
The term metacognition is attributed to Flavell. He described it as "knowledge
concerning one's cognitive processes and products or anything related to them, e.g., the
learning-relevant properties of information and data." Furthermore, he referred to it as "the
active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes concerning
the cognitive objects or data on which they bear, us in the service of some concrete goal or
objective" (Flavell, 1976). Simply stated, metacognition "knowledge and cognition about
cognitive phenomena" (Flavell, 1979). The meaning metamorphosed into "thinking about
thinking." "knowing about knowing." and "cognition about cognition."
Components of Metacognition
The elements of metacognition are metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
regulation (Flavel 2004). These two elements are interrelated; the presence of the first one
enhances the second element.
Metacognitive knowledge (also called knowledge of cognition) refers to "what
individuals knows about their cognition or cognition in general" (Schraw, 2002). It involves
three kinds of metacognitive awareness, namely: declarative knowledge, procedural
knowledge, and conditional knowledge. See Figure 1).
EXPERIENCE
Metacognitive thinking among learners provides avenues for them to learn more. Two
aspects of metacognitive instruction is content knowledge (concepts, facts, procedures) and
strategic knowledge (heuristic, metacognitive, learning). It is essential that to think through a
process, learners must have the content knowledge to think about something. One also needs
to have a heuristic (shortcut) or algorithm (formula) to follow in developing the skill (Medina
et al., 2017). Instruction should have a content component and direct instruction on how to
work through a process.