Metacognition: Why we need to teach pupils how to learn

In a primary school in South London, a teacher is talking about pineapple-shaped swimming pools. He’s in front of around 30 Year 6 pupils. He’s giving a maths lesson.

On the surface, this is to test the pupils’ skills in calculating perimeter and area, as that appears to be the focus of the lesson. But lean in closer and you will realise there is another, more pressing motive: he’s teaching the children how to learn.

The pineapple had come up because the teacher had been discussing using a visualisation technique to remember the difference between area and perimeter. One pupil suggested the visual of a swimming pool, which has come to be used as an example.

His objective was to make it clear to the class that while we all struggle to remember things sometimes, what works for one person as a reminder might not work for others: the children would need to find a visual association that worked for them. A pineapple-shaped swimming pool may or may not be the right fit.

Such explicit teaching of memory techniques and modelling of the learning process may not seem unusual. Is teaching a child how to learn - alongside helping them to learn - not what every teacher worth their salt does every day?

Well, in theory, yes. In practice?

“I have yet to meet a teacher who doesn’t think metacognition is important, yet there are many classrooms where it is not intentionally promoted and taught,” says Simon Camby, group director of education for the global schools’ group Cognita.

He is not alone in that view. Metacognition - learning how to learn - has decades of research behind it. It is the subject of a substantial Education Endowment Foundation report, Metacognition and Self-regulated Learning, which further highlights its importance.

Converting to the classroom

And yet, while most teachers have heard of the concept, and some might even know something about how to teach metacognitive skills, actually doing it explicitly is not as common as it could be and understanding around what is proven to work is still hazy.

So, if teaching metacognition really is important, and we have known that for decades, why doesn’t everyone know how to do it well? And why isn’t it already happening in every classroom?

Shirley Larkin, senior lecturer in education at the University of Exeter, explains that there are two distinct processes involved.

The first is the “development of metacognitive knowledge”.

“This is knowledge of your own thinking processes. It develops with age and experience,” she explains. “So you can say, ‘I know I have a good memory for faces but not for names’ or ‘I know I cannot do maths because my brain doesn’t work like that’.

“You can see that metacognitive knowledge can be true or false, helpful or unhelpful. So it is important that teachers facilitate helpful metacognitive knowledge.”

So stage one is having an understanding of how your brain works - and the effect that these workings can have on your ability to complete tasks or solve problems. This might mean being aware, for example, that just because you are looking at the PIN for your new bank card right now, that doesn’t mean you will be able to remember that number later, when you are trying to pay for your shopping. Your memory simply doesn’t work like that.

The second process, Larkin says, is regulation of our thinking. This involves identifying and applying strategies to support our mental processes - and then monitoring the effectiveness of those strategies, to check that they are working.

In our very basic example above, of trying to remember a new PIN, you might come up with a couple of mnemonics, one of which links the digits to a memorable date and another which links them to letters of the alphabet.

Later, when you are standing at the till in the supermarket, you realise that you are unable to recall the date - since it is just another number - and turn to the alphabet mnemonic instead. This does the trick. Next time, you will know that a letter-based mnemonic is the best way to go.

You may assume that these skills are picked up naturally through the process of learning itself - that you don’t need an explicit lesson in it.

Rich pickings 

Savage concedes that it is something that many of us - as skilled adult learners - will come to do automatically. These strategies are usually developed through exposure to what Savage calls a “rich lived environment” in which we encounter lots of different things. “Whether we are taught these skills explicitly or not, good learners tend to develop metacognition strategies,” he says.

But, through no fault of their own, some children do not have that “exposure” to the “rich lived environment”. As such, there is no natural learning process for metacognitive skills and they arrive at school unable to self-regulate and then struggle to pick up that skill through the normal learning process.

This can have a significant negative impact. The ability to self-regulate is crucial not just at school, but also in later life.

“Sophisticated metacognition is important for intellectual development and for our performance in school and beyond,” confirms Rose Luckin, professor of learner-centred design at UCL Institute of Education. “People who develop good self-regulation skills are more likely to fulfil their potential and achieve.”

In terms of academic achievement, the research certainly suggests that this is the case. A number of empirical studies have demonstrated a connection between metacognition and levels of attainment.

“There is compelling evidence from a range of global sources that the effective promotion and teaching of metacognition impacts positively on the achievement of students,” says Camby.

According to the Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit, self-regulation approaches have “consistently high levels of impact”. A 2014 EEF study, Improving Writing Quality, used a structured programme of writing development based on a self-regulation strategy and found gains, on average, of an additional nine months’ progress.

And in 2015, three more evaluations around metacognition in the classroom found gains of between two and five months’ additional progress - and demonstrated that pupils from low-income families, in particular, benefited.

These strategies are, the EEF Toolkit points out, “particularly effective” for low-achieving pupils.

And, from a school leadership perspective, teaching metacognition is recognised as a very cost-effective way of improving pupil progress. The EEF Toolkit estimates that most projects would cost less than £80 per pupil.

Too good to be true?

So, if it is proven to work, is integral to learning and is good value, why isn’t it already being taught in every classroom?

Andrew Foster, a former teacher and now head of education for training provider Tougher Minds, believes a comprehensive understanding of the science is needed, and this isn’t something teachers will necessarily possess.

“It’s a big ask to expect schools to be experts in the science of learning, because this isn’t what teachers are trained in. Everything is subject-based,” he explains. “Teachers can’t be expected to replicate the level of understanding that comes from years of conducting trials and reiterations.”

For our teacher with the pineapple pool, educating pupils about how their brains work is a technique that proves successful. He explains that his pupils “understand that they have neurological pathways and know the difference between knowledge and forgetting”, which helps them to make sense of the new strategies he teaches them.

However, for any metacognitive practice to be really effective, he is also adamant that it needs to be part of a whole-school strategy; all teachers and leaders need to be on board, building work around metacognition into the curriculum and into CPD programmes. Metacognition shouldn’t be an add-on, or an afterthought - or something that just one maverick teacher is doing with one Year 6 class.

“We are training our learning support assistants in this and getting them to learn how to do the techniques, so they can communicate it to the students, too,” the teacher explains.

This is something that the EEF has recognised. The final recommendation of the new report is that “schools support teachers to develop their knowledge of these approaches and expect them to be applied appropriately”.

This includes developing teachers’ understanding through high-quality professional development, and ensuring that promoting metacognition is not an “extra” task for teachers, but that it is “built into their teaching activities”.

If what we are really looking for is a change in culture, then, surely it shouldn’t be happening only on a school-by-school basis. Might it instead be necessary to go further up the chain and incorporate learning about metacognition into teacher training, or even build it into our assessment systems?

Oakley certainly thinks so. And, according to her, it might not be long before everyone working in education thinks so, too.

“In the years to come, people will say, ‘You’re kidding. We didn’t use to have this?’” she says. “‘Isn’t it crazy that we used to not even teach students how to learn?’ It’s mind boggling when you think about it - that students go through 12-16 years of education and never get a single course on how to learn effectively.”

Helen Amass is Tes’ deputy features editor. She tweets @Helen_Amass.

This article is an updated version of a feature from an April 2018 edition of Tes magazine