The role of metacognitive knowledge in learning, teaching, and assessing

Theory Into Practice, Autumn, 2002 by Paul R. Pintrich

Strategic knowledge includes knowledge of the various strategies students might use to memorize material, to extract meaning from text, and to comprehend what they hear in classrooms or what they read in books and other course materials. Although there are a large number of different learning strategies, they can be grouped into three general categories: rehearsal, elaboration, and organizational (Weinstein & Mayer, 1986). Rehearsal strategies refer to the strategy of repeating words or terms to be remembered over and over to oneself, generally not the most effective strategy for learning more complex cognitive processes. In contrast, elaboration strategies include various mnemonics for memory tasks, as well strategies such as summarizing, paraphrasing, and selecting main ideas from texts. These elaboration strategies result in deeper processing of the material to be learned and result in better comprehension and learning than do rehearsal strategies. Finally, organizational strategies include various forms of outlining, concept mapping, and note taking, where the student makes connections between and among content elements. Like elaboration strategies, these organizational strategies usually result in better comprehension and learning than rehearsal strategies.

In addition to these general learning strategies, students can have knowledge of various metacognitive strategies that will be useful to them in planning, monitoring, and regulating their learning and thinking. These strategies include ways individuals plan their cognition (e.g., set subgoals), monitor their cognition (e.g., ask themselves questions as they read a piece of text; check their answer to a math problem), and regulate their cognition (e.g., re-read something they don't understand; go back and "repair" their calculating mistake in a math problem). Again, in this category we refer to students' knowledge of these various strategies, not their actual use.

Finally, there are a number of general strategies for problem solving and thinking. These strategies represent the various heuristics individuals can use to solve problems, particularly ill-defined problems where there is no definitive algorithmic solution. In the problem-solving area they can include the knowledge of means-ends analysis as well as knowledge of working backward from the desired goal state. In terms of thinking, there are a number of general strategies for deductive and inductive thinking, such as evaluating the validity of different logical statements, avoiding circularity in arguments, making appropriate inferences from different sources of data, and drawing on appropriate samples to make inferences.

Knowledge about cognitive tasks

In addition to knowledge about various strategies, individuals also accumulate knowledge about different cognitive tasks. Knowledge of tasks includes knowledge that different tasks can be more or less difficult and may require different cognitive strategies. A recall task is more difficult than a recognition task, for example, because in the recall task, the individual must actively search memory and retrieve the relevant information; while in the recognition task, the emphasis is on discriminating among alternatives and selecting the appropriate answer.