Shutterstock
By Zayna Dar, Founder, Shuhari Tuition
Metacognition is a term that appears frequently in discussions about effective learning practices, but it’s often poorly explained. At its core, metacognition involves students becoming aware of how they learn and being able to make informed decisions about their own learning. It requires them to consider questions such as: Do I actually understand this? What do I find difficult about this topic? Why did I make that mistake? What should I do differently next time?
This kind of self-awareness has a big impact on how effectively you revise. When preparing for GCSEs or A levels, you’re faced with a large amount of material and limited time in which to prepare. Simply spending more hours at your desk doesn’t necessarily lead to better results. You need to know where your time is best spent and recognise when a particular revision strategy isn’t working.
Metacognition helps you develop this awareness. It encourages you to take an active role in deciding how you approach your learning and to reflect on whether your chosen strategies are actually working. A few questions before, during, and after a revision session will help you figure out what you still don’t understand and how to fix that.
This blog considers how metacognition can help students identify what they understand and where the gaps in their knowledge lie. It looks at how students can use this awareness to plan their revision and improve their exam performance.
The difference between familiarity and understanding
One of the most common problems students face during revision is confusing familiarity with understanding. For example, you might read through a chapter of your textbook several times and become increasingly comfortable with the material. Perhaps you recognise key terms when you see them and remember having covered the topic in class. This can create the impression that you’ve successfully learnt the material.
Familiarity, however, doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that you can retrieve or apply the information. Exams require students to produce knowledge when they encounter a question, often under time pressure. You may be required to explain a concept, interpret information, make an argument, or apply their knowledge to an unfamiliar scenario.
This is why you should regularly test what you can remember without looking at your notes. Asking yourself ‘Could I explain this to someone else?’ can reveal whether you’ve properly understood the material. You can also practise the revision technique blurting, which is where you close your textbook and write down everything you can remember about a topic before checking your notes afterwards. Any important omissions then provide useful information about which areas you need to revise further.
Exam-style questions are particularly helpful here. You may feel confident after revising a topic, only to discover that you struggle when faced with a question requiring you to use that knowledge in a new context. This is valuable information, as it gives you an opportunity to address knowledge gaps before your final exams. Once that misunderstanding or weakness has been identified, you can then choose an appropriate response.
You might need to ask your teacher or tutor for clarification or search for a clearer explanation in your revision guide or online. The important point is that you begin to make decisions based on evidence about your own learning. It makes your revision more effective because you’re continually checking whether your understanding holds up when you have to retrieve and apply information in an exam question.
Isolating weaknesses and planning strategies to tackle them
Effective revision requires you to have some understanding of where your weaknesses lie, but this can be surprisingly difficult to figure out. Students often gravitate towards topics they already know reasonably well because revising familiar topics is reassuring. You might spend an hour reviewing a chapter you feel comfortable with and feel like it was a productive session, even though other areas required considerably more attention.
Metacognition encourages you to reflect on your own knowledge before deciding what to revise. A good starting point is to look at the specification for your subject, which outlines the content that you’ll cover in the course. Work through each topic and consider how confident you are based on your performance in exam-style questions. The purpose of this exercise is to create a realistic picture of your current ability.
Next, think about why you’re struggling in a particular area. There may be several possible explanations. Perhaps the underlying concept has never been fully understood. Perhaps you know the content but struggle to remember it without prompts. Or maybe you understand the material during lessons but have difficulty applying it to exam questions. The problem could also relate to the wording of questions or knowing how to structure your answer. Identifying the specific source of the difficulty will help you choose an appropriate strategy.
Suppose you’re revising fractions in maths and you’re finding it difficult to add fractions with different denominators. Reading the same explanation from a textbook is unlikely to make things any clearer. You could benefit from using visual representations such as fraction bars or asking your tutor to work through an example step by step.
Once the process has been clarified, you can then test your understanding by answering some questions independently. If you get the answers correct, you have evidence that the new explanation has helped. If you continue to struggle, consider where you become confused.
This process can be applied to humanities subjects too. You might know the plot of a novel extremely well and remember lots of quotations. When you attempt an essay question, however, you may find it difficult to develop your argument. Your revision should respond to that particular difficulty. Looking at model answers to see how strong essays are structured or practising building paragraphs under timed conditions could be useful at this stage.
This systematic approach makes revision more manageable. Large syllabi can be overwhelming when you think about everything you have yet to revise. Breaking the specification down and identifying particular areas of weakness gives you a clearer starting point.
You can then work through those areas one by one and reassess your understanding as you make progress. Planning is an important part of metacognition because it encourages you to think about your approach to revision and identify the strategy most suited to the problem you’re facing.
Understanding how you learn best
A critical part of metacognition is developing an awareness of the conditions and approaches that help you learn effectively. For example, you might spend an afternoon making notes from a textbook because this is how you’ve always revised.
You may finish with several pages of neatly organised notes and feel that you’ve made good progress. But a useful metacognitive question to ask yourself at this stage would be: How much of this revision could I remember tomorrow without looking at my notes? This encourages you to think beyond the activity itself and consider what it’s achieving.
Experiment with different revision techniques and reflect on the effect each one has on your understanding of the material. For example, you might use a mind map to link key ideas and show how they relate to one another. This can be particularly helpful for visual learners, who may find it easier to understand and remember information when they can see the connections between different topics.
You may also discover that teaching the concept back to someone else helps you identify which parts you understand and where your understanding becomes muddled. The important part is the reflection that follows. Different learning tasks will place different demands on you. Memorising vocabulary requires a different mental process to developing an argument in an essay. Learning how to solve simultaneous equations involves different skills to recalling a sequence of events in history.
If you’re revising French vocabulary, for instance, you might discover that reviewing a vocabulary list isn’t helping you retain the words, but testing yourself with flashcards gives you a clearer indication of what you can actually recall. Once you recognise this, you can deliberately use retrieval practice when you need to strengthen your recall.
This kind of reflection helps you choose the best revision strategy for you. You may assume you’re good at a particular subject because you understand everything when your teacher explains it. When you attempt to reproduce that understanding when answering an exam question, however, you may discover that you need further practice. Metacognition encourages you to investigate these assumptions.
You don’t need to find a single revision method that works for everything. You may change your approach according to the subject and the type of material. The stage of learning you’re at can also influence your revision strategy.
What matters is that you become capable of evaluating your approach and making conscious decisions about your learning. Teachers and tutors can help students develop this awareness by making the learning process itself part of the conversation. Asking ‘What helped you understand that?’ or ‘How did you work that out?’ encourages you to articulate your thinking.
Monitoring your thinking while you learn
Metacognition also involves monitoring your thinking while you’re learning. Students often do revision without paying attention to whether they’re actually processing the information. Learning to pause and check your understanding makes this process far more valuable.
For example, imagine you’re reading a difficult section of a textbook. You reach the end of the page and you realise that you can’t explain what you’ve just read. If you’re actively monitoring your thinking, you’re more likely to recognise this and respond to it. You might look up the definition of a term you’re not familiar with or summarise the text in your own words.
Try to get used to identifying when and where your understanding has started to break down. You may recognise individual words and follow the general structure of the explanation, but lose track of how the ideas connect. Stopping to ask yourself ‘What is this actually saying?’ brings that difficulty to your attention.
The same principle applies when answering exam questions. As you work through a question, you can monitor whether your answer is actually addressing what’s been asked. In English, you might pause after writing a paragraph and consider whether the evidence you’ve included supports your argument. In maths, you might check whether your working follows logically from one step to the next. In science, you might consider whether you’ve included enough detail to fully explain the process referenced in the question.
This can help you become more aware of when your concentration is beginning to decline. If you notice that you’ve read the same sentence several times without taking in the information, that’s useful information about your current state of attention.
You might decide that you need a short break before continuing, or to postpone the revision session to another time when you’re able to focus better. The ability to recognise these moments helps you become more strategic as a learner. You begin to notice when your current approach is no longer helping you learn effectively, prompting you to make some adjustments.
Teachers and tutors can encourage this by asking students to verbalise their thinking while they work. Questions such as ‘What made you choose that answer?’ or ‘How do you know that’s correct?’ encourage students to pay attention to the reasoning behind their decisions.
This is useful even when the student arrives at the correct answer. Getting something right doesn’t necessarily mean that the student understands why their answer is correct. Asking them to explain their reasoning can reveal whether they’ve understood the underlying process and could use the same method to solve a similar problem without help.
The same applies when a student gets an answer wrong. Rather than immediately providing the correct answer, a teacher or tutor should encourage the student to revisit their thinking and identify where their reasoning went off track. This gives the student an opportunity to become more aware of their own thought processes.
As you become more accustomed to monitoring your thinking, you can begin doing this independently. You may start to notice when you’ve stopped understanding a text or when an argument in an essay needs further development. This is one of the ways metacognition can make you a more independent learner. You becomes an active observer of your own learning while it’s happening, giving you the information you need to make better decisions about your approach to revision.
Using metacognition to study smarter
Metacognition gives you something that’s difficult to develop through revision alone: a clearer understanding of yourself as a learner. When you become more aware of how you think, what helps you understand something, and where your understanding begins to break down, you can make more informed decisions about your revision.
This is especially important during GCSEs and A levels, when you’re expected to become a more independent learner. You won’t always have someone beside you to tell you which topic to revise, explain why an answer was incorrect, or suggest what you should try next. Developing metacognitive skills gives you the confidence to make those decisions yourself.
It also changes the way you respond to learning challenges. Finding something difficult becomes an opportunity to investigate what’s causing the problem and consider what might help. A poor result provides useful information about your current approach to revision. A successful result helps you understand which strategies have been effective. Each experience gives you information that you can use to guide your future learning.
This is where a teacher or tutor can be particularly helpful. At Shuhari Tuition, our tutors provide students with the knowledge they need while also helping them understand how to approach learning independently. Asking students to explain their reasoning gradually shifts more responsibility onto the student.
In a nutshell, metacognition is about making learning more intentional and developing the habit of asking yourself better questions. We help students identify what they do and don’t know, and crucially how to fill those gaps in their knowledge, so they become better equipped to manage their own learning.
The ability to reflect on your own thinking has benefits beyond revision, and is useful whenever you encounter something difficult or unfamiliar in life. Developing that self-awareness gives you a stronger foundation for learning independently throughout further education and your future career.
