Making The Abstract Explicit: The Role Of Metacognition In Teaching And Learning

This policy paper presents findings from a wide range of literature on metacognition in primary and secondary education. To help make the abstract explicit for school leaders and teachers, we focus on three aspects of metacognition commonly studied in the literature , metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive skills, and metacognitive experiences. Part 1 describes key insights from research on metacognition. Part 2 presents promising practices to improving students’ metacognitive abilities. Finally, Part 3 provides recommendations for IB stakeholders meant to strengthen and reinforce the potential of IB programmes to develop students with metacognitive strengths for lifelong learning. This Research Brief provides a brief overview of metacognition in education and summarizes the main findings and recommendations from the full policy paper.