What Is Metacognition? 3 Benefits of Metacognitive Awareness

Metacognition is, simply put, thinking about thinking. It’s a higher-level form of awareness in which you reflect back on your own ability to learn about, evaluate, and understand information.

Metacognition is a prominent subject of study within the educational psychology field, as increased student metacognition is a major goal for institutions at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels. Through fostering a better sense of self-awareness, teachers and educational psychologists hope to foster more effective forms of student learning.

Every person might benefit from a different kind of metacognitive strategy—and ironically, it will take some thinking about your own metacognitive capabilities to see what best helps you achieve your personal learning goals.

Metacognitive knowledge grants you a unique ability to understand yourself and the way you think. Here are three key benefits of metacognitive awareness:

1. 1. Greater potential for empathy: As you better understand your own thinking, you may develop a greater sense of empathy for other people. Watching your emotions go up and down, following different trains of thought, and engaging in other forms of self-monitoring all help you realize that maintaining mental health and happiness can sometimes require a heavy lift. With that realization comes the ability to show empathy to others going through the same thing day in and day out, too.
2. 2. Improved problem-solving skills: With each new learning experience, you further hone your problem-solving skills—and as you reflect on how you solve problems, you gain an opportunity to further hone your metacognitive skills, too. Metacognition allows you to transcend merely solving problems to help you better arrive at ideal study strategies and creative forms of thinking suited to you distinctly as an individual.
3. 3. Increased self-awareness: The more you engage in self-questioning, the more you become aware of both yourself and how you process information as an individual. Greater self-awareness—particularly of your own distinct cognition style—leads to a better understanding of the strategies you should use to achieve your goals. This can help you further improve your own knowledge and understanding of the world.

There are many different components of metacognition, and you can use them all in different ways. Consider these seven examples of metacognition in action:

1. 1. Acknowledging biases: Metacognition helps you shore up your critical thinking skills, including about when you’re being fair or exhibiting bias. The greater insight you gain into your own thinking processes, the better you’ll become at discerning when you’re being objective versus when you’re letting your ego and emotions get in the way of fair analysis. This form of metacognitive regulation can prove useful in various areas of a person’s life, both academic and personal.
2. 2. Comparing memories: Metacognitive awareness allows you to think about prior knowledge as well as present experience. Suppose you went to New York City as a high school student and had a terrific time, but a more recent trip felt lackluster. By utilizing a sense of metamemory awareness, you can evaluate both experiences against each other to try to figure out why one memory feels positive and the other doesn’t. As a result, this sort of metacognitive experience can help you gain a greater understanding of how you feel about things—like New York City—in a more general sense.
3. 3. Editing your own writing: An innately cognitive task, writing requires you to turn an unwieldy thought process into the right set of words to convey what you mean as clearly as possible. As such, when you edit your own writing, you’re thinking about your own thoughts even further—evaluating whether you said exactly what you truly felt on the page in front of you. This can improve your reading comprehension in general, while also proving to be a very useful form of self-assessment.
4. 4. Evaluating personal strengths and weaknesses: Take a moment to reflect back on a recent learning task performance of yours. Conduct a self-evaluation—ask what you did well on and what presented struggles. Try to define your innate strengths and weaknesses when it comes to thinking about and memorizing information. This metacognitive process becomes a form of self-regulation—allowing you to see how to bolster your strengths further and find ways to improve on your weaknesses.
5. 5. Improving your own learning processes: Every learner is different, but greater awareness of your personal learning style will help just about everyone. For example, some might benefit more from explicit instruction from a teacher, while others prefer to study on their own. Arriving at a unique and self-regulated learning strategy distinct to your own talents will help you do better on your next quiz and achieve a greater sense of self-awareness while you’re at it.
6. 6. Planning for the future: Use your metacognitive abilities to think about your cognitive and emotional reactions to potential events. Create a concept map about where you think you’d like to see yourself in five years, and then ask yourself why you feel that way. Take this sense of self-understanding and carve out the appropriate strategies to achieve your future goals.
7. 7. Practicing mindfulness: Meditation is a preplanned period of self-reflection, so it’s hard to conceive of a better time to nonjudgmentally watch your own cognitive processes in action. In other words, when you meditate or practice mindful awareness, you engage in a real-time form of metacognitive monitoring. You can either choose to focus mindfully on your metacognitive habits while meditating or try to release them as you pay attention to another object of focus, like your breath.

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