In earlier times, a very simple model of metacognition was widely adopted by academics: planning, monitoring, evaluation. The problem for teachers was that it said nothing about how to get from planning to monitoring – what to actually do in the classroom. Later, methodological prompts and scaffolding came to be viewed as a means of implementation, but these ideas were vague and usually researched together rather than separately.
Now, we have a much fuller menu of 19 different techniques that teachers can use, all with evidence of their effectiveness. Teachers can choose from these and blend them in their own creative way. Here, we draw together the common threads regarding implementation from the preceding articles, along with a vote count of the most popular techniques judging by how often their use is mentioned. The number of mentions of each technique is given in brackets in the following text. Remember, all of these techniques have demonstrated evidence of effectiveness.
Metacognitive Techniques Which Had Their Own Article
An early preoccupation with metacognitive knowledge has now been displaced by a much stronger focus on metacognitive skills (4), and in particular on self-regulated learning (SRL) (31), which had the highest number of mentions and was related to decision-making (7). Thus, the emphasis has shifted from 'knowing about' metacognition to actually 'doing' metacognition. SRL implies a broad range of applications of metacognitive skills, but few studies have actually measured its operation in more than one subject domain and at most in three.
Among the specific metacognitive techniques surveyed, self-assessment (18), questioning (16), visualising (16) (which was also associated with diagrams (7)), interaction with memory (15) and memory and disability (14) all came out strongly.