Metacognitive thinking is thinking about your own thinking. It involves monitoring your understanding, evaluating your learning strategies, and adjusting your approach when something is not working. Research published in ScienceDirect found that metacognition had a significant positive correlation with academic performance in mathematics across 147 studies and nearly 700,000 participants, with stronger effects as students moved from elementary to higher education.
What It Looks Like in Practice
- Self-testing before exams: Rather than re-reading notes, a metacognitive thinker tests themselves to identify exactly which concepts they do not yet understand, then focuses study time on those gaps.
- Monitoring comprehension in real time: During a lecture or reading, a metacognitive thinker pauses to check even if they genuinely understood the last section or just read the words.
- Adjusting study strategies: If a particular method, such as passive highlighting, is not producing results, metacognitive thinking leads the student to switch to a more active technique.
