TeachingTimes is publishing a series of articles about metacognition (listed below). Each article is derived from a section of the book by Keith Topping entitled 'Improving Thinking About Thinking in the Classroom: What Works for Enhancing Metacognition' (2024; www.routledge.com/9781032512952; New York & London: Routledge).
The Oxford English Dictionary defines metacognition as 'awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes'. Similarly, Wikipedia suggests that metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. In these articles, we go beyond these definitions to explore self-regulation – turning metacognition into action concerned with improving one’s thought processes.
The aim of these articles is to define and report evidence-based methods and programs and how they are implemented in order to help school teachers improve their students' thinking skills, metacognition and self-regulated learning - not just in a narrowly focused area but across the curriculum and beyond it, with a view to preparing them for the world beyond education.
Long after they have forgotten the detailed knowledge they were taught, the students’ refined and widely applicable ability to think and think about their thinking should help them perform better in a job or profession and help them solve everyday problems in their personal life, leading to a happier person with a greater sense of well-being.
There are a number of studies of teacher perceptions of thinking skills and metacognition. Generally, they suggest that teachers have a vague perception that thinking skills and metacognition are a good idea, but little idea about how to develop them. This is true irrespective of the country involved. However, metacognitive training certainly shows a strong general effect on overall attainment. Effect Sizes in meta-analyses vary from 0.69 (Dignath, et al., 2008) to 0.55 (Eberhart et al. 2023) – moderate to large. Of course, these are reasons for writing these articles.