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Why Metacognition Makes Primary Children Better Learners

When pupils are taught to think about how they learn, they become better learners, says Eleanor Stringer – and she has the research to prove it…

Eleanor Stringer
by Eleanor Stringer
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Freya fiddled with her pencil case. Every Friday, she would experience a quiet dread when facing the weekly spelling test. This week, though, she felt more confident than before. After a couple of weeks characterised by annoying mistakes, she had worked hard in readiness for this test. She had devised two of her own mnemonics and she had practised her ‘le’ ending words, as well as ‘surprise’ with an ‘r’, repeatedly.

As Mr Thomas began the spelling test, Freya listened hard. She knew that sometimes she would feel a little pressure when her teacher moved quickly onto the next spelling, but that this week she would listen carefully and remember what she had practised. One or two words were no doubt tricky, but Freya had weighed up her options each time and she was utterly confident of her success.

Before Mr Thomas had a chance to cycle through the correct spellings, Freya sat up straight, with a smile lighting up her face, fuelled by quiet satisfaction. She had already thought about her new spelling routine and how she would stick to it next week, too.

This spelling test anecdote is a familiar scene that is played out regularly across the country. The actions and thoughts of Freya as she is learning her spelling, inside and outside of the classroom, are simply the typical stuff of everyday learning and school. And yet, despite much of her thinking and strategies remaining hidden and implicit, her success is instructive. Freya exhibits the thoughts and actions of a successful self-regulated learner, and she deploys crucial metacognitive strategies.

So why does this matter? Well there’s a large body of evidence that tells us how effective developing metacognition is for learning. The Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, an accessible summary of international evidence, rates it as ‘high impact for very low cost, based on extensive evidence’.

But despite all this evidence showing us the benefits of focusing on metacognition, it can still seem like an elusive topic. And with good reason. Beyond a simple definition of ‘thinking about thinking’ or ‘learning to learn’, it can be hard to describe what ‘metacognition’ means in the classroom, let alone put it into practice.

Plan, monitor, evaluate

On a very basic level, metacognition is about pupils’ ability to monitor, direct, and review their learning. Effective metacognitive strategies get learners to think about their own learning more explicitly, usually by teaching them to set goals, and monitor and evaluate their own academic progress.

There’s a common misconception that developing these metacognitive skills is only important for older pupils, and not for those in primary school. But we know from research that children as young as three can engage in a wide range of metacognitive and self-regulatory behaviours, such as setting themselves goals and checking their understanding. Focusing on metacognition in primary school is likely to bring long-term benefits to pupils’ attainment.

However, ‘teaching’ metacognition is easier said than done; there’s certainly no simple method or trick. We know that learners develop some metacognitive knowledge and skills naturally, and most teachers support metacognition in their teaching without realising it.

For example, when introducing a maths problem, if the teacher talks the class through how they, as an expert learner, would think about finding a solution, they are making explicit their metacognitive processes. That said, it can be difficult to give concrete examples of what metacognitive knowledge and skills actually look like.

But with a large body of international evidence telling us that when properly embedded these approaches are powerful levers for boosting learning, it’s clear that we do need to spend time looking at how to do this well.

At the Education Endowment Foundation, we recently published a guidance report to support teachers in changing their classroom practice to improve their pupils’ metacognitive skills. It offers seven practical, evidence-based recommendations, and shows how metacognition can helpfully be distilled down to three key steps in all learning:

“It is about planning how to undertake a task, then cognitively undertaking that activity, while monitoring the strategy to check progress, then evaluating the overall success.”

Expert modelling

One recommendation from our report that could be particularly useful for younger pupils is teacher modelling. A tailor will teach an apprentice by allowing the beginner to work alongside them, watching their movements and techniques closely, modelling their craft. Teachers in all subjects do the same – revealing their expert subject knowledge and skill to their novice learners.

For example, while teaching young pupils how to perform a forward roll safely in PE, a teacher might talk through her actions as she demonstrates:

“I don’t want to hurt my neck and want to do this neatly. So first, to protect my neck, I need to tuck my chin to my chest like this. Then when I start to roll, I remember not to roll onto my head. Instead, look how I’m going to roll onto my back and shoulders. This also means my back is round, so I can smoothly roll like this. Now, who can remember what I did first to protect my neck?”

This type of modelling is only effective if the pupils have access to relevant knowledge (in this example, if these are very young children, they may not even know what a forward roll is supposed to look like, so the teacher might perform one without talking it through first). It’s also more effective when pupils are engaged in the task being modelled and have the opportunity to practise it immediately after the demonstration.

Structured support

Ultimately, the purpose of modelling strategies in this way is to help novice pupils become more capable of learning independently and thinking metacognitively, so the process should involve teachers making gradual changes in support.

For example, the teacher might support their pupils by using direct modelling and support, but as guided practice moves to independent practice, teacher input will change to monitoring and intervening only when necessary. Reducing support in this way helps to develop cognitive and metacognitive knowledge. Over time, such thinking becomes habitual – acting as ‘internal scaffolding’ that will support future learning.

Teacher modelling is just one strategy for developing metacognition. If it really were as simple as 1-2-3 then every teacher would have it sussed, but there is much more to learn and understand if we are to have a properly shared understanding of metacognition in staffrooms and classrooms around the country.

Nonetheless, what is so striking about the guidance report findings is that although we know that our pupils will develop strategies to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning naturally, it’s clear that by being more explicit in how we teach them to develop such crucial metacognitive knowledge and understanding, we can help our pupils to become much more successful and confident learners.

Eleanor Stringer is head of programmes at the EEF, and one of the authors of the EEF’s guidance report on metacognition and self-regulated learning.

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