What is metacognition?
Metacognition refers to the awareness and control of one’s own thinking and learning processes. It involves reflecting on how we think, plan, monitor, and evaluate our learning strategies to become more effective learners.
Why is metacognition important in education?
Metacognition enhances learners’ ability to learn more effectively by helping them understand their learning strategies, monitor their progress, and adjust their approaches when necessary. It promotes independent learning and better problem-solving skills.
How does metacognition benefit learners?
Learners who develop metacognitive skills:
- Become more independent and self-regulated learners
- Improve their academic performance by choosing effective learning strategies.
- Develop better problem-solving and critical-thinking skills
- Increase their engagement with learning
Why is it important for teachers to understand learners' metacognitive levels?
Understanding learners’ metacognitive levels helps teachers tailor their instruction to meet individual learning needs. It allows them to identify learners' strengths and weaknesses in self-regulation, problem-solving, and reflective thinking, which improves overall learning outcomes.
How do Hachette Learning Adaptive and Academy products support learners with metacognition?
Metacognition plays an important role in the approach to help learners to master the knowledge and understanding they need in the shortest time and to uncover hidden misconceptions.
Learners evaluate their understanding after working through a chunk of content. After answering each question, progress bars at the top of each assignment allow them to monitor their progress within an activity:
How do Hachette Learning Adaptive and Academy products report on metacognition?
The platform uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to track learner performance in real time – their accuracy, speed and confidence levels. As well as adapting the learning path, this data is used in metacognition reports for educators and learners.
Metacognition responses
Learners across a class will vary in how much they know about a topic, and this knowledge is categorized into four responses:
- Conscious competent: they are aware that they know the topic well. This is the optimum stage where learners can answer a question correctly and are aware that they know the answer.
- Unconscious competent: they are unaware that they know the topic well. This is when a learner answers a question correctly but is not aware that they knew the answer.
- Conscious incompetent: they are aware that they don’t know the topic very well. At this stage, the learner is aware that they don’t know the answer and they understand there are things they still need to learn.
- Unconscious incompetent: they are unaware that they don’t know the topic very well. This is when a learner doesn’t know an answer and they don’t realise they don’t know it. At this stage, it’s possible they are unsure of what makes it difficult – it could be because of misconceptions that the learner has about the topic.
One of the main goals of these platforms is to move learners to be consciously competent for all topics.
Metacognition reports for educators
The metacognition pie chart shows a summary of metacognitive responses for the entire class, which can be seen at whole course, at module/task level or at individual learning objective level.
By clicking on the metacognition pie chart, you can view the more detailed metacognition report that shows a bar for each learner, with the relative proportion of their metacognitive responses during the path to mastery.
The most challenging learning objectives show those learning objectives that had the highest level of misconceptions (unconscious incompetence) and the highest percentage of wrong answers.
Teachers can use the metacognition reports to:
- Identify the specific areas and learning objectives that whole classes and individual students are struggling with and provide additional teaching and focus
- Support learners with thinking about their learning more explicitly, encouraging some to be more confident in their knowledge, and unpicking misconceptions or providing additional learning support for those learners who think they know the topic well but keep getting the answers wrong
Metacognition reports for learners
Each learner is provided with a detailed metacognition learning awareness report that relates to their own learning for each of the courses that they have been assigned, or have subscribed to.
This will help them understand which topics they know well and are confident about, which they know well, but lack confidence about. It also identifies topics that they know they don’t know well, as well as those they think they know, but actually don’t. Although the platform provides a learning pathway to focus on these latter topics, the report gives them the knowledge about where they should focus.
They can also see which learning objectives they found most difficult within a topic, again providing them with the areas that they need to focus on.