Metacognition is the process by which individuals think about their own learning. It is often described as an internal dialogue as it is a process in which the learner makes meaning of what has happened in his or her brain. While teachers can provide prompts and other tasks to facilitate reflection, metacognition is largely an individual process. Metacognition comprises several aspects of learning through which the learner becomes aware and over which the learner exerts control.
Through metacognition, learners declare what they know and become conscious of their skills and knowledge. This aspect of metacognition includes both explicit declarations of what one knows and can do and an implicit sense of self-efficacy. A learner demonstrates the outcome of this metacognition when they state (for example), “I know how to find roots of quadratic equations,” and they also demonstrate it when they recognize the path of a projectile as can be described with a quadratic equation. The declarative aspect of metacognition includes both recognition of a skill and recognition of the purpose of the skill and its connection to other problems.
A second aspect of metacognition is a learner making judgments about the sufficiency of their current knowledge. Those who judge current understanding is sufficient will recognize what they know and what they do not know. The incompleteness of the knowledge may turn to curiosity, which motivates further learning, or it may lead to contented and informed ignorance.
Metacognition also focuses each individual as a developing learner. Identifying interests is a small part of this; much more important is learners recognizing which methods and strategies are necessary or efficient or efficacious in given situations. Through this metacognition, learners understand how they learn, and this is developed and refined as learners gain experience learning new strategies and selecting alternatives when one proves ineffective. Metacognition leads learners to understand what they know and how they learn.
When teachers include problems, challenging problems that are not immediately solved, they can encourage students to be metacognitive. After adolescence, updating one’s internal cognitive structures does become more difficult, but it is effectively impossible without the capacity to be metacognitive.