How Metacognition Affects Student Learning

Awareness and understanding of one’s own thinking process can provide vast advantages for every student 's learning. This high order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning was given the label “Metacognition” by an American Developmental Psychologist known as John Flavell (Baker, 2009). Research supports the notion that metacognition when improved can result in increased learning and academic achievement of students (Fouche & Lamport, 2011). In contrast, other people argued that metacognition is a jargon and it doesn’t communicate to non-researchers (Schoenfeld, n.d.). While there are different perspectives involving this word, metacognition improves academic performance because of how it helps …show more content…
In a research conducted by an English Language Arts Teacher, Annable (2012) reported that she introduced metacognition in her class in addition to generating the students to come up with solutions themselves by how she circles grammatical mistakes without correcting them on their returned graded essays. This resulted better grammar performance of her students, minimal range seek for assistance and students are now able to identify more cognitive strategies for editing (Annable, 2012). This kind of technique which Annable implemented into the course about figuring out to find solutions by the students themselves is a metacognitive strategy in which she trained them in order to enhance to think about how they think or in short to fully develop their …show more content…
Students can easily achieve academic success when this metacognitive strategies are introduced and regulated. Metacognition have been shown that it does improve student’s academic performance because of how it makes students to be self reliant such as becoming self-editors to think of different ways by themselves to come up with solutions, to be an active learner by becoming attentive and understand ideas and concepts more deeply and also to be able to easily transfer learnings into long term memory for a better retrieval. Some might argue that metacognition is hard to understand. However, metacognition is something we do on a moment-to-moment basis such as questioning one’s self like ‘do they really want a chocolate bar?’ or ‘do they want to go out tonight?’, by deciding what to answer, they are already using metacognition (Fleming, 2012). People all have metacognition but they just don’t understand it or even aware of it. Everything needs regulation in order to understand something. Nothing is easily understandable without practice and success cannot be easily achieved without hard work. That’s why if students want to improve in their academic performance then they should start improving thinking about their