This post is shared as part of #workingOutLoud on the Learning Science Guidebook, alongside Sae Schatz and Geoff Stead. Work shared in this space is our ongoing weekly progress: it’s not the final output, but our explorations on the way. Todays post is one of the foundational sections on metacognition.
Thinking about Thinking. What’s the most important thinking skill? If you had a magic lamp that granted the opportunity to improve your – or your team’s – cognitive abilities, what would you choose?
For us, the answer would be ‘metacognition.’
The evidence shows us that it’s a skill that can be learned by everyone, is substantially impactful, and can be a ‘secret weapon’ for you or your organisation.
‘Meta’ means ‘higher’ or ‘second-order’ – above. And ‘cognition’ refers to our thinking processes, such as perception, comprehension, decision making, and learning. So, metacognition is the process of thinking about our own thinking.
Or, more formally, the use of cognitive strategies to monitor and regulate our own learning and other mental processes!
Metacognition is closely related to the leadership ideal of ‘know yourself and seek self-improvement.’ It’s self-awareness and the ability to control your mental and emotional processes through effort and motivation as well as introspection, reflection, and problem solving.
It’s like an out-of-body experience, where you watch yourself doing a complex task, deduce your gaps and capabilities, reflect on why you made specific choices, and then nudge yourself towards improvements for the future.
That constellation of skills pays dividends across nearly all professional (and most personal) settings.
So, upgrading metacognition is like wishing for more wishes from the genie of the lamp – because good metacognition routinely improves all other outcomes.
Consider learning settings, for example: metacognitive skills are highly correlated with successful outcomes.
In fact, meta-analytical research (the most reliable kind of study) found that someone’s general intellectual ability only accounts for about 10% success in learning outcomes, while metacognitive skills account for 17%.
In other words, if two identical people complete a course, but one has metacognitive skills while the other does not, the metacognitive learner will perform about 17% (or almost two letter grades) better than the student who lacks metacognitive skills.
Metacognitive Building Blocks
John Flavell coined the term ‘metacognition’ in the 1970s, and he originally defined its components as metacognitive knowledge, (b) experiences, (c) tasks and goals, and (d) strategies and actions. Here’s how we’d translate that work for organisational learning contexts:
Metacognitive skills are:
- Self-awareness: Your knowledge of yourself, including your character traits, feelings, behaviours, intent, strengths and weaknesses, and a grounded calibration of your capabilities and gaps for a given task or area of performance.
- Self-regulation: Setting goals and monitoring your progress towards them, adjusting course if needed. Can involve components like goal setting, self monitoring, and evaluation. Good self-regulators can detect differences between their ideal behaviours and their current ones. They can critically assess their own performance and use cognitive strategies, coping strategies, and emotional intelligence to adjust their thoughts or behaviours as needed.
- Reflective judgement: Examination and evaluation of knowledge, along with the awareness that information (including our own knowledge) can be incorrect, biassed, incomplete, or viewed differently from different perspectives. This is particularly important for ill-defined, complex problems, where the reliability and completeness of evidence, opinions, and information needs to be carefully considered—and periodically reevaluated in case new information becomes available.
As we were writing this, we found ourselves thinking about how this described the individual, but that maybe we should be starting to explore the idea of shared social metacognition, which would tie into the earlier ideas we shared about the social creation of meaning. More on this later…
Mr. YouTube Man
Julius Yego is a gold-medal javelin champion – even though he never had a formal teacher. As he explains in one documentary, ‘My coach is me, and the YouTube videos.’
Julius taught himself the javelin – and all of the athleticism needed to become an Olympic champion – by watching videos.
That process required reflective judgement to seek out the information he needed, separate the signal from the noise, and mentally combine the disparate parts into a coherent strategy.
It took self-awareness to evaluate his strengths, weaknesses, and performance.
And it took self-discipline, grit, and good self-regulation to set goals, determine methods for closing the performance gap between those goals and his current abilities, and to stick with his plan – even while others around him tried to discourage it.
Julius exemplifies many of the components of metacognition. Those same videos were available to millions, but it was Julius who turned them into a gold medal.
Imagine having an organisation with those metacognitive skills and abilities.
Such an organisation could monitor the world, accurately self-evaluate, grow and adapt to change, and persevere through challenges to reach its goals – time and time again.
Metacognition is a powerful skill!
Fostering Metacognition
Metacognitive skills can be learned by anyone. Some people naturally develop them as children, while others grow the capability more slowly – or perhaps never develop a robust metacognitive toolkit unless a teacher or mentor helps.
For organisational contexts that means a couple things: First, metacognition is a good target for professional development, since it’s widely learnable, notably impactful, and (we’ll get to this shortly) there are well-documented techniques for encouraging it. Second, even if metacognition seems like something that professionals surely already possess, many people will have holes in their metacognitive toolkits.
Metacognitive Learning Techniques
John Hattie created a meta-meta-analysis of educational intervention, built from around 1200 meta-analyses about what teaching and learning techniques are quantitatively proven to work best. Several metacognitive techniques are on that list, which means that their use improves learning outcomes.
Among the top metacognitive techniques for learning are:
- Transfer strategies, applying previously learned capabilities to new contexts
- Elaboration/organisation, such as grouping, paraphrasing, and linking ideas
- Help seeking strategies, learning when and how to seek help
- Metacognitive strategies, practising and getting feedback on how you learn
- Strategy monitoring, consciously monitoring and optimising your learning strategies
- Self-verbalization/questioning, talking aloud about your thinking during a task +feedback
- Self-regulation strategies, selecting, monitoring, and using different learning strategies
- Elaborative interrogation, asking questions to deepen knowledge
We’re extrapolating a bit, but it seems safe to say that these methods are a good starting place for nurturing metacognitive skills in yourself and others. (If you’re interested in other techniques, search for terms like “metacognitive scaffolding” or “self-regulated learning theory.”)
Practical Takeaways
Invest in Metacognition: Are you recruiting for people with high metacognition or otherwise developing their metacognitive skills? If not, then you’re missing out! This also applies to yourself, your team, and even your children (if applicable).
Repurpose the Tools: There are a ton of metacognitive techniques designed for teachers (often for K-12 settings) as well as questionnaires designed for research. These are all good for their intended purposes, but you can also repurpose them, for example, as self-directed reminders, peer-learning prompts, or mentorship topics.
Sprinkle it on: Organisational learning isn’t typically abstract. More often, it focuses on practical tasks and skills. Fortunately, you don’t need to help develop or assess individuals’ metacognitive skills in a vacuum. Instead, incorporate metacognition as a crosscutting capability across your other learning and development efforts. It’s kind of like salt: Adding a little metacognition into your L&D dishes to make them each that much better!
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