“Knowledge cannot be forced; it is to be soaked by the mind”. Spending a lot of time studying but feels like your hard work does not match your performance in examination? To rectify this you need to do self-monitoring, self-evaluation and self-regulation. To understand this you must understand the idea of Metacognition.
Metacognition is to know yourself as a learner, knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Metacognition can play a vital role by assisting students with identifying their individual educational needs; create strategy to accomplish their task, in self organizing and in regulating their own learning. Recent shifts in pedagogy have emphasized encouraging students to be independent, self regulated learners. The teacher cannot always be there to hold their hand beyond school. It requires students to be critical analysts of their own thinking process and they need to tune up their thought process as per power with the learning requirements of the 21st century, where they are equipped enough to overcome complex or unexpected problems.
Some factors to be considered for making Metacognition to happen effectively are listed below:
Role of parents is of paramount importance in molding the thought process of the child. Parent-child relations form the foundation of important traits of adolescent’s emotional, social and cognitive development. Healthy support and guidance from parents can help the child to perform mentally much better. Role of early childhood education is to be critically examined. The engagement of young students in metacognitive thinking is considered necessary, as they seem capable of developing fundamental forms of Metacognition after the age of three. Implementation of interesting activities in an enjoyable manner, physical activities and self check teaching styles are such activities that could guide young students to reflect on their own learning and realize what they are doing. Educators can guide students to adopt strategies like using their subject syllabus as a roadmap to identify specific topic based learning outcomes, based on which the learning style can be designed, mapped and evaluated. Recall your prior knowledge about topics to be covered. It may help students to build the framework for absorbing the new knowledge easily. Ask yourself more and more questions and compare your learning practices with others with the aim to improve further. Build writing habits, it can help to organize your thoughts and assess what you know. Start making keynotes while reading. It ensures that you are actively engaged with the study material, makes the learning process easy and can also be used for future reference. Critically assessing your previous examinations performance can be a great help in Metacognition. Look at what you know and what you missed and introspect for the reasons for missing them.