Developing and Embedding Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities
Metacognition
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Evidence suggests that metacognitive techniques can improve educational outcomes and help pupils perform better in the classroom. As part of learnable intelligence, metacognition is important to many aspects of education, including:
- pedagogy that elicits metacognitive responses from pupils;
- teaching pupils to use self-monitoring strategies to help them learn to self-regulate for better learning;
- the potential to contribute to aspects of formative assessment; and
- helping pupils self-assess their own responses.
Downloads
The following resources are available to help you incorporate metacognition into your lesson planning and you can access a pre-recorded webinar on metacognition from the Webinars section of this web area.
This presentation summarises the main points about metacognition. You can use it to raise the issues and explore considerations as part of a school development planning activity.
This document discusses where metacognition fits in to the Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities (TS&PC) and provides links to additional reading.
Metacognition and Self-Regulation: The Inner Voice offers further insights into how to introduce learners to metacognitive thinking and how it typically develops over time.
Based on the recommendations in the Metacognition in the Northern Ireland Curriculum resource, you can adapt the materials in this resource to support learners when building opportunities for metacognitive reflection into classroom activities.