Metacognition Explained: How to Think About Your Own Learning

Metacognition is thinking about your own thinking: judging what you know and do not know, then changing how you learn because of that judgment. Psychologists call the first part monitoring and the second control. Together they are the self-checking side of learning how to learn, the skill of studying in ways that last.

Knowing the textbook answer to what is metacognition is the easy part. Doing the judging well is harder, because right after you study something is a poor moment to ask whether you have learned it. The material is fresh, it comes to mind easily, and that ease feels like knowledge. A day later some of it will be gone, with little warning of which part.

The best-supported fix is simple: check yourself later, with the answer hidden, and let what you miss decide what you study next. The plan, monitor, evaluate routine further down turns that into three steps for an exam, a certification or a new tool at work.

What is metacognition in simple terms?

Metacognition, in simple terms, is your awareness of your own thinking and your ability to steer it. The Stanford psychologist John Flavell gave the idea its modern shape in a 1979 paper, describing metacognition as knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena: what you know about how minds, your own included, take in, store and use information.¹

Flavell separated two ingredients. Metacognitive knowledge is what you believe about yourself as a learner, about tasks and about strategies, such as a belief that you learn better by listening than by reading. Metacognitive experiences are the feelings that come up during a task about how it is going; his example is the sudden feeling that you did not understand something another person just said. He also warned that how well you can recall something now may not predict how well you will recall it later.¹

The UK’s Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), an independent charity that reviews education research, gives a plainer version in its 2025 guidance for teachers: metacognition is a learner’s ability to be aware of, reflect on and direct their thinking. The word that matters is direct, and the EEF treats these as skills that can be taught.² Knowing that you tend to get lost in statistics is metacognitive knowledge; slowing down and rereading a chart because you feel lost is metacognition at work.

The components of metacognition: monitoring and control

Research on learning splits metacognition into two linked components, following a 1990 framework by Thomas Nelson and Louis Narens: monitoring, which means judging the state of your own learning, and control, which means acting on that judgment by choosing what to study, how and for how long. Robert Bjork, John Dunlosky and Nate Kornell lay out the framework, and the back and forth between its two parts, in their 2013 review of self-regulated learning.³

Examples of metacognition are everyday. A project manager studying for a certification asks herself whether she could explain a scheduling method without her notes; that is monitoring. Finding she cannot, she turns the chapter into practice questions; that is control. These are illustrations, not cases from research.

The two parts are not independent. In a 2009 review, Janet Metcalfe of Columbia University described experiments showing that people’s judgments of learning steer what they choose to study again. When an experiment made some word pairs feel better learned than others, people chose to restudy them less, even though they recalled them no better.⁴

1. Study: read, practice, take notes
2. Wait: later the same day or the next day
3. Monitor: judge with only the question in view: could I produce the answer?
4. Control: restudy what you missed, move on from what you recalled

So control can be no better than the monitoring that feeds it. When a study plan fails, check the judgment before you blame the method: you may have used a good method on the wrong material.

Why your judgments of learning go wrong

Your sense of how well you have learned something rests on cues such as how easily it comes to mind and how familiar it looks. Bjork, Dunlosky and Kornell conclude that these cues often mislead, because ease can come from recency, or from cues present while you study that will be missing later. Three traps stand out. The first is fluency: in a study by Nate Kornell and colleagues, people’s predictions of how well they would remember words shifted with the size of the font, which made no difference to recall, while the promise of an extra study session, which helped a lot, left their predictions largely unchanged. The second is having the answer in view. Scanning a chapter you are about to be tested on makes the material feel known all along, because the answers are right there; at the test they are absent.³

Rereading your slides the night before a presentation sets the same trap. Every point looks familiar, because it is on the slide. Tomorrow there will be questions and no slides, and how polished the deck looks tells you little about what you can say without it.

The third trap is ignoring forgetting. In a study by Asher Koriat and colleagues, people’s predictions of their test scores did not change whether they were told the test would come immediately, in a week or in a year, unless forgetting was pointed out to them.³ Before you trust Friday’s confidence, ask what will have faded by Monday.

Myth

If material feels familiar when you reread it, you have learned it.

Fact

Familiarity mainly shows you have seen it recently. Recalling it with the page closed is the better test.

The best-known claim about misjudging yourself is narrower than its reputation: Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University in the US reported four studies in 1999 in which people scoring in the bottom quarter on tests of humor, grammar and logic greatly overestimated their performance, and they linked this to a weaker ability to tell right answers from wrong ones.⁵ How much of that pattern is a statistical artifact is still argued, as the account of what the Dunning-Kruger effect really says sets out. Either way, when something reads smoothly, ask whether you could produce it with the page closed.

Wait before you judge: the delayed-judgment effect

Judgments of learning become far more accurate when you make them some time after studying rather than straight away, a pattern called the delayed judgment-of-learning effect. Thomas Nelson and John Dunlosky demonstrated it with word pairs in two influential studies published in 1991 and 1992.³

The reason is what the judgment can see. Right after study, an item comes to mind easily whether or not it will last. After a delay, trying to recall it is a real test of long-term memory, which is what you are trying to predict. Rhodes and Tauber’s results fit this explanation well, that delayed judgments draw on more diagnostic information from long-term memory, though they leave room for others.⁶

The study

Moderate evidence

Judging straight after study or after a delay, pooled across experiments

In a 2011 meta-analysis, the psychologists Matthew Rhodes and Sarah Tauber pooled experiments that compared judgments of learning made immediately after study with judgments made after a delay. People’s ratings tracked their own later recall far more closely when they made them after the delay (g = 0.93, a large effect). Delayed judgments also brought a modest but reliable benefit to memory itself (g = 0.08).⁶

The finding is about relative accuracy: telling the items you know from the ones you do not, which is what you need to decide what to study next. The pooled studies measured predictions of memory for studied items.⁶ Treat the result as a strong pointer for memorizing terms and facts, not a measured result for complex work skills.

Delay helps with longer texts too. Keith Thiede and colleagues found in 2003 that readers who wrote five keywords for each text after a delay judged their understanding more accurately than readers who wrote them straight after reading.⁷ Metcalfe’s review adds that only that delayed-keyword group then chose to restudy the texts it had done poorly on, and it scored higher on the final test. It also matters what you look at: judgments made after a delay with only the cue in view, the question without its answer, are highly diagnostic of later performance, the review notes.⁴

The simplest way to judge cold is a delayed self-test, which puts active recall, the habit of quizzing yourself from memory, to work as a monitoring tool. Later the same day or the next day, look only at the question or heading, produce the answer, and only then decide whether you know it.

Why is metacognition important for learning?

Metacognition is important for learning because study decisions follow judgments: when you believe you know something, you stop working on it. Bjork, Dunlosky and Kornell note that students given the option tend to drop items from study once they believe they have learned them, even though another study or retrieval attempt would help.³

That makes overconfidenceoverconfidence: Being more sure of your knowledge, skill or forecasts than the results justify, for example rating yourself above average or giving too narrow a range for an estimate. It is broader than the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is about how the error varies with skill.Full entry in the glossary costly. In two studies of college students learning key-term definitions, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson had students judge how much of each typed answer was correct. Students whose judgments were more accurate remembered more on a test two days later, both when accuracy was changed experimentally and when it varied naturally between students. This summary stays within what the abstract reports.⁸

In schools, the EEF’s toolkit of international evidence rates metacognition and self-regulation as a high-impact, low-cost approach for disadvantaged pupils, and its 2025 guidance draws on a review of 355 studies.² That evidence comes from schoolchildren in classrooms, not from adults learning at work.

For working adults the picture is less tidy. A 2011 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary by Traci Sitzmann and Katherine Ely of self-regulated learning research, covering work-related training and educational attainment, found that goal level, persistence, effort and self-efficacy had the strongest links with learning, while planning and monitoring showed no significant relationship.⁹ Those findings are correlations, not tests of training. In two studies, by contrast, trainees prompted to self-regulate during online work-related training and a lab task performed better over time than unprompted trainees, whose scores declined.¹⁰ Both accounts rest on abstracts only.

How can I improve my metacognitive skills? Plan, monitor, evaluate

The EEF’s 2025 guidance describes metacognitive regulation as a cycle: plan how to tackle a task, monitor progress while working on it, then evaluate how well it went, updating what you know about yourself, the task and your strategies along the way. The guidance is written for teachers of children; the three steps below adapt it for adults, and the adaptation is ours. It also says that while the plan, monitor, evaluate idea can be introduced in general terms, the strategies are mostly tied to specific content and are best learned that way.² Practice the routine inside the subject you are learning, not as a separate thinking-skills exercise.

1. Plan: name what you must be able to do

Before a session, write down what you need to be able to do, not just what you will cover: explain a policy to a client, build a report without the help page, answer a past exam question. Then ask the planning questions the EEF suggests teachers model aloud: what do I already know about problems like this, and what ways of solving them have I used before?² Decide now how you will check.

2. Monitor: test, do not reread

While you work, pause at the end of each section and recall the main points with the page closed. Mark how sure you are, then check. The EEF lists self-testing, journals and tools such as exam wrappers, a short self-evaluation form filled in after a test, as ways to improve the accuracy of learners’ self-judgments.² Save the important check for later, with only the question in view.

3. Evaluate: compare the prediction with the result

After a test, a presentation or a practice task, compare what you expected with what happened. Write three lines: what I predicted, what happened, what I will change. Then change one thing about your method for next time. Over a few rounds, the gap shows how far to trust your sense of readiness.

Plan, monitor, evaluate in one study session

• Write what I must be able to do by the end
• Choose a method and decide how I will check it
• Recall each section with the page closed
• Rate my confidence, then check the answer
• Re-test the key points later, question only
• Note what I predicted, what happened, what I will change

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence on metacognition is strongest for the narrow claim that self-judgments made after a delay are more accurate, and weakest for adults learning at work, where planning and monitoring have not shown a clear link with learning.

The bottom line

Judging your own learning is where people often go wrong, because ease, familiarity and answers in view all make material feel learned. Check yourself later, with the answer hidden, and let what you miss decide what you study next.