Definition
Any knowledge or cognitive activity that takes as its object, or monitors, or regulates any aspect of cognitive activity; that is, knowledge about, and thinking about, one’s own thinking.
Characteristics
Although the construct, metacognition, is used quite widely and researched in various fields of psychology and education, its history is relatively short beginning with the early work of John Flavell on metamemory in the 1970s. Metamemory was a global concept encompassing a person’s knowledge of “all possible aspects of information storage and retrieval” (Schneider and Artelt 2010). Flavell’s (1979) model of metacognition and cognitive monitoring has underpinned much of the research on metacognition since he first articulated it. It was a revised version of his taxonomy of metamemory that he had developed with Wellman (Flavell and Wellman 1977). According to his model, a person’s ability to control “a wide variety of cognitive enterprises occurs through the actions and...
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References
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Stillman, G. (2014). Metacognition. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4978-8_166
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4978-8_166
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