The Importance Of Metacognition

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Metacognition can simply be referred to as higher order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged In learning, often simply described as ‘thinking of thinking’. While learning, many people face the task of understanding what was learnt while reading or studying. Metacognition is an effective way of learning as it enlightens the learner to self-awareness and self-monitoring, hereby encouraging planning, setting goals and application of strategies to identified factors and afterwards evaluating the effectiveness of the applied strategies and also achieving the effectiveness of metacognition on academic achievement and sometimes happiness. Metacognition helps individuals overcome certain learning barriers and …show more content…

Metacognition helps enlightens the readers or learners to self-awareness and self-monitoring by sharpening areas of their cognitive processes or practices that need to be improved upon, studies show that top class students usually know their strengths and weaknesses while students that have lower grades are yet to identify areas of their learning processes that are either their strengths or weaknesses. When learners become aware of their strengths and, particularly weaknesses, a new door of learning is open, where it is easier to learn because irrelevant limits or hindrances have been removed. When metacognition is practiced, learners usually undergo or perform something called self-regulated learning. Self-regulated learning often abbreviated as (SRL) is simply defined as a form of learning that is guided by metacognition, strategic action, and motivation to learn. To further describe the relatedness of Self-regulated learning and metacognition a review by Fox and Riconscente (2008) concluded that “metacognition and self-regulation are parallel and intertwining constructs that are clearly distinct yet mutually entailed both developmentally and in …show more content…

A study “Metacognitive awareness of learning strategies in Undergraduates” by Jennifer McCabe was conducted with the aim of accurate prediction amongst undergraduate students. Although, the reason for the study may seem unclear initially a quote from Jennifer McCabe study stated “If instruction on applied learning and memory topics is associated with increased metacognition and subsequent academic performance, as suggested in prior research, then participants with more in-depth instruction should perform better on the scenarios survey items”. The survey was conducted on two sets of undergraduate students to find out the effect of metacognition in various different learning strategies, the first and second groups consisted of two sets of different students, one set consisting of first year students and the latter consisting of “high performing and mature students”. The second set of students were enlightened on the beneficial values of applying certain kinds of learning strategies before making their choice on which to use while the first set were asked to choose without any form of help or guidance. The metacognitive awareness between both sets was greatly differential when the results of the survey were shown. The second set not only performed well but performed way better than the set of unguided first year students, metacognition being the defining

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