Ch 1 Concept Review

What is metacognition? Metacognition is 'cognitions about cognitions' -- knowledge, understanding, learning, or just plain thinking about what it is that one knows, understands, is learning, is thinking about, etc. Metacognitive knowledge is a specific category of metacognition focused on what we know about knowing -- the facts or understandings we have about metacognition, as well as our awareness of our own understanding. Metacognitive monitoring is the process of feeding information from the acting cognitive brain into the metacognitive stores -- it's how we tell ourselves whether we know something, or are making progress in figuring something out. An example of monitoring is the feeling of "just not getting this" -- when we realize that what we're doing to learn something is not effective. Metacognitive control is the process of changing how we are approaching a topic in order to think about it more effectively -- by control of our environment, by putting other thoughts out of our minds, by ordering ourselves to focus.