Metacognition refers to one’s awareness of their personal thinking and ability to regulate the same. Some examples of metacognition in everyday life are:

Awareness about having difficulty remembering people’s names in social situations

Many a time individuals come across situations where they meet people that they have met in the past and yet do not remember their names. They find it difficult to recall the names of the people that they have interacted with. In such instances, many individuals abruptly ask the other person for their name.

Reminding yourself that you should try to remember the name of a person that you just met.

Many people once in their lifetime find it difficult to remember the names of people they have met in the past. They try various ways to retain the names of familiar faces to avoid any kind of awkward moments or embarrassment when they encounter the concerned person.

To remember the names of people many individuals use positive associations by utilizing their memory banks. such as they might relate the name of a person that newly met with one of their family members who share the same name.

Realizing that a person knows the answer to a question but simply can’t recall it at the moment

Even though people hold a vast knowledge base through learning and experience over the period there may be instances where there are questions to which they are not able to recall the answers to at a given moment.

They complain about knowing the answer but not being able to actively recall it at the moment. For others, it might seem to be an excuse that individuals give to avoid judgment or embarrassment however many people might indeed encounter a similar situation.

Reviewing an article, they read last week because they are unable to recall the key points.

Individuals with great memory retention and high intellectual abilities might also experience a situation where they revisit the article that they read a couple of days ago due to the lack of ability to recall the main points that they remembered after reviewing the article for the first time.

The inability to recall information that was initially embedded in one’s mind does not have to do anything with their intellectual capacities in all cases.

Realizing that there is something incorrect with your solution to a problem.

There might be instances where people actively apply problem-solving strategies to a current problem at hand, However, they are not satisfied with the strategies post its outcome leading to discarding the initial problem-solving strategies applied as incorrect.

In conclusion, experiencing these metacognitions in day-to-day life is common for many individuals. Many people might underestimate the importance of metacognition unless they understand its role in effective learning.

Supporting this researchers indicate that good readers monitor their comprehension as they read and poor readers do not. In that good readers understand and acknowledge things that they do not understand while reading and do something about it like revisit the article, stop and think about the point, take notes and reflect on it later which are usually not done by other readers.

What are metacognitive strategies?

Metacognitive strategies refer to the tools that one uses to monitor self-improvement and become a positive learner. It requires a person to control their thinking in ways that help them to meet their goals optimally.

What are some examples of metacognitive strategies?

Some examples of metacognitive strategies are:

Self-questioning

Self-questioning requires a person to take recurrent pauses during a particular task and check on one’s own behaviors. Individuals usually carry out self-questioning while completing the task and after completing the tasks in the form of self-reflection.

Such questioning is a way through which individuals can improve their performance in a particular task. Without this, individuals lack questioning themselves which would otherwise help to fill up some crucial gaps.

Some examples of self-questioning during a task might involve:

Did I miss out on something?
How can I do this task better the next time?
Am I looking at the task in the right way?

Meditation

Meditation is known to be one of the most effective metacognitive strategies to help keep a person’s mind clear. Meditation helps to clear out the chaos that goes on in a person’s head due to internal and external affairs. It helps an individual to stay focused and calm during learning.

It is believed that meditation is carried out to become more aware of one’s own inner self and thought process.

Self-reflection

The concept of self-reflection involves taking breaks to think about one’s task at hand. It involves consciously reflecting on the way an individual thinks to improve their task or performance.

A number of steps are involved in the self-reflection process which is as follows:

Planning a task
Attempting the task
Understanding how one performed the task
Coming up with the positives of the task with a focus on improving one weak point
Trying again and
Consciously self-reflecting

Once individual masters the skill of self-reflection reflecting upon one’s task can be done simultaneously while performing it helping a person to make quick adjustments to one’s thinking process.

Being aware of one’s strengths and weaknesses

The backbone of metacognitive strategies is the person’s ability to identify their weaknesses and strengths. One can do this by carrying out a general assessment of their weaknesses and strengths to achieve significant improvement.

One can carry out a genuine assessment by making a chart of four major sections which are:

Weaknesses: writing down what one thinks their weaknesses are.

Strengths: writing down what one perceives their strengths are.

Opportunities: identifying opportunities that helped to improve one’s cognitive skills over a period

Threats: identifying the potential trends that might act as barriers to improving one’s cognitive skills over a period.

Use of Mnemonics

Mnemonics can be looked at as a useful tool that one can use to improve their retention capacity. This might include various tools like forming associations, use of rhymes, patterns, and abbreviations.

Mnemonics Make it much easier to recall information by adding context to a fact.

Some important tools of mnemonics are:

Rhyme

Making rhymes out of a name helps to remember and recall the name much better the next time a person encounters it.

Associations

Forming associations particularly between familiar and unfamiliar entities makes it easier for individuals to remember information.

For example, remembering people with names shared by your family members are much easier to recall than those names that are completely unfamiliar.

Thinking aloud

One of the important sociocultural theories of education given by Lev Vygotsky indicates that new learners tend to think aloud before internalizing their thinking. The theory proposes that thinking aloud makes an individual think deep.

Thinking aloud not only helps people become more conscious about their cognitive processes but also helps other people identify areas that are going astray.

Active listening strategies

Active listening strategies are some ways that individuals ensure they are actively and attentively listening.

Some examples of active listening strategies involve:

Facing the speakers directly
Making eye contact
Asking questions
Acknowledging the speaker when required
Repeating and rephrasing what was said by the speaker.

Planning ahead

Planning about how an individual will take forward a task might be an important metacognitive strategy. It involves thinking about what a person is going to do to accomplish their task.

Planning ahead might involve making decisions about a few crucial elements such as:

Noting down the strategies one will adopt during the initiation of the task

Mapping out to various skills that one might need to use for completing a task appropriately

keeping in mind the mistakes that an individual made in the past and consciously reminding themselves not to do them again

keeping some additional tools at hand to help stay focused on the completion of the task such as making graphics.

Conclusion

Metacognition can be looked at as an internal guide that makes a person aware of their thinking and learning process. These internal guides act as the guiding forces for the actions and behaviors that individuals carry out effectively in various situations.

It can be said that metacognition makes individual better and positive learners and give them control over their abilities. There are various ways that individuals can adopt to improve their metacognitive skills.

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