metacognition: a standalone construct

John H. Flavell introduced metacognition in his 1979 article in American Psychologist, defining it as a person's knowledge and awareness of their own cognitive processes and their active monitoring of those processes, in short, thinking about one's own thinking. Thomas O. Nelson and Louis Narens gave the idea its now-standard theoretical framework in 1990, splitting it into two directions of information flow: monitoring, in which a person reads the state of their own learning or memory (for example, judging how well they have understood a passage), and control, in which they act on that reading (for example, deciding to reread the passage or move on). The construct therefore covers both metacognitive knowledge (what a learner believes about how memory and learning work) and metacognitive regulation (planning, checking, and adjusting during a task). What makes metacognition a landmark is its span: it names the layer of cognition that observes and steers the rest, and it links research on memory, reading, problem solving, and self-directed study under a single account of how people supervise their own minds. A separate colloquial use of the prefix meta- to mean simply self-referential or self-aware in everyday speech is not the psychological construct measured here.[1][2]

Unit

A cognitive capacity, expressed as knowledge about one's own cognition together with monitoring and control processes that operate on ongoing thought

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed through metacognitive judgments such as judgments of learning, feeling-of-knowing ratings, and confidence calibration, and through self-report inventories of metacognitive awareness