Development of Metacognition in Higher Education: Concepts and Strategies

Development of Metacognition in Higher Education: Concepts and Strategies

Maizam Alias (Universiti Tun Hussein Onn, Malaysia) and Nor Lisa Sulaiman (Universiti Tun Hussein Onn, Malaysia)
Copyright: © 2017 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2218-8.ch002

Abstract

Metacognition promotes critical and creative thinking, enabling an individual to generate more options to problem solutions, better judgments and decision makings. It is thus, the key success factor for dealing with academic, career and life challenges. Although it can be improved through teaching, explicit teaching of metacognition is not prevalent in higher education as it is often assumed that metacognition is already acquired through previous educational experiences. This assumption may be true for some but lacking in others as both knowledge disseminators (teachers) and recipients (learners) are unable to access and assess their own thinking processes to optimize their thinking efficiency. As a consequence, there are learners in higher education who do not develop their full potential. The aim of this paper is to discuss the concepts in metacognition and strategies that can be adopted to promote the development of metacognition among higher education learners.
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Metacognition, Cognition, And Critical Thinking

Metacognition is a type of cognition and thus there is no metacognition without cognition. Cognition refers to “…the mental process by which external and internal input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used; as such, it involves a variety of functions such as perception, attention, memory coding, retention and recall, decision making, reasoning, problem solving, imaging, planning and executing action.” (Neisser, 1967 in Brandimonte, Bruno & Collina, 2006, p. 3). Learners with poor cognition have limited ability to carry out some of the mental functions mentioned above.

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