What is Metacognition?
Metacognition is thinking about your own thinking: knowing what you know, monitoring your comprehension as you learn, and regulating your strategies accordingly. The concept was formalized by John Flavell in 1979. Accurate metacognition is what separates learners who study what they need from learners who reread what feels familiar.
Flavell's framework distinguishes metacognitive knowledge, what you believe about your own abilities, about tasks, and about strategies, from metacognitive experiences, the in-the-moment feelings of knowing or confusion that trigger a change of approach. Together they form a control loop over cognition: set a goal, monitor progress, and adjust strategy when monitoring says you are off course.
The catch is that monitoring is systematically biased. Fluent rereading feels like learning, recognition masquerades as recall, and massed practice feels more effective than spacing even while it produces less. Many of the strongest study techniques work partly by repairing this: a retrieval attempt or a plain-language explanation replaces a feeling of knowing with direct evidence about what you can actually produce.
While reading, metacognition can be made concrete with small checkpoints: predicting what an article will argue before reading, pausing at section breaks to summarize from memory, and reviewing which highlights you can still explain a week later. Each converts a private impression of understanding into something checkable.