Meta cognitive awareness

For instance, a lecture can ask the students to reflect on how they attended to a continuous assessment test with respect to what they had covered in class. Moreover, an instructor can ask his/her students to visualize on how their knowledge in a given lesson has developed in their minds. Therefore, this important psychological concept can be traced back in the 1970s when the Flavell (232) defined the term meta-cognition as an individuals’ knowledge regarding cognition and his/her management of cognition. Demetriou’s theory established meta-cognition as a process that involves self-representation, regulation, and monitoring which are also the important integrals of the human brain. Hence, meta-cognition involves considering one's process of thinking such as memory capabilities, study skills, and the expertise to monitor the learning process.

Moreover, it includes three awareness types in regard to knowledge that are; procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, and declarative knowledge. In correspondence to the knowledge types, meta-cognitive awareness requires three essential skills such as planning of the strategies, allocation of the available resources correctly, monitoring the comprehension process and evaluating or appraising the efficiency of the final product. Finally, the student can re-evaluate the strategies that he/she employed during the process and gauge their effectiveness. Similarly to cognitive regulation and knowledge by an individual, it needs some motivation which is also a meta-cognitive skill to ensure that a given skill has been completed successfully. It is common that the students that portray a wide range of meta-cognitive skills are likely to perform better than students who have no skills at all.

However, there is no distinction between domain-specific and domain-general skills with regard to meta-cognition. The cognition skills that would be used to solve a complex problem can effectively be used in solving a simpler problem. However, meta-cognition awareness concept can greatly be influenced by the personal beliefs that one bears regarding a given subject. Therefore, it is merely impossible to expand on the meta-cognitive process of an individual without taking into consideration the personal beliefs, cultural expectations, and situational norms. Some theories that discuss the interaction of self-concept and social meta-cognition include implicit theories such as increment list and entity theory. This explains why this concept is greatly useful in critical cases and has been employed in the reader and response criticism.