Learning to Learn (L2L) is a branch of educational theory and practice concerned with helping people become more effective learners. As can be seen in Figure 1, the amount of literature published on L2L has expanded significantly throughout the last 40 years. This literature centres around the concept of metacognition – often taken to mean ‘thinking about thinking’ – following the introduction of the term by John Flavell in his 1976 paper Metacognitive aspects of problem-solving.
* As featured on eric.ed.gov
Table 1 lists some examples of educational programmes which have appeared in the literature on metacognition throughout this period. These programmes vary in focus and scale, however it is also clear that they overlap in significant ways. For example, it could be said that initiatives such as ‘Learning to Think’ and ‘Thinking about Thinking’ centre around metacognition, whereas ‘Learning about Learning’, ‘Learning How to Learn’ and ‘Thinking Together’ involve broader notions of meta-learning and self-regulation. Explaining the difference between these two notions, Chris Watkins describes metacognition as “awareness of thinking processes, and ‘executive control’ of such processes”, while “meta- learning (making sense of one’s experience of learning)... covers a much wider range of issues than metacognition, including goals, feelings, social relations and context of learning” (Watkins, 2001, p1). Underscoring the distinction, Watkins asserts: “metacognition is a defining characteristic of our species: meta-learning is its dynamic epitome” (Watkins, 2001, p7).
Evidence for L2L: a mixed picture
In 2011, the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation jointly published a Teaching and Learning Toolkit, with a view to helping schools decide how best to allocate Pupil Premium (PP) funding (Higgins et al., 2011). Regularly updated ever since, the Toolkit has been well received by the teaching profession and the majority of schools in the UK now use it to inform strategic planning. Ranked first in this league table of educational effectiveness are ‘meta-cognition and self-regulation’, which are described as having “high impact for low cost, based on extensive evidence” (Sutton-EEF, 2015).
Meta-cognition (sometimes known as ‘learning to learn’) and self-regulation approaches aim to help learners think about their own learning more explicitly… The evidence indicates that teaching these strategies can be particularly effective for low achieving and older pupils. (Sutton-EEF, 2015)