Development of Metacognition in Higher Education

Abstract

Metacognition promotes critical and creative thinking, enabling an individual to generate more options to problem solutions, better judgments and decision makings. It is thus, the key success factor for dealing with academic, career and life challenges. Although it can be improved through teaching, explicit teaching of metacognition is not prevalent in higher education as it is often assumed that metacognition is already acquired through previous educational experiences. This assumption may be true for some but lacking in others as both knowledge disseminators (teachers) and recipients (learners) are unable to access and assess their own thinking processes to optimize their thinking efficiency. As a consequence, there are learners in higher education who do not develop their full potential. The aim of this paper is to discuss the concepts in metacognition and strategies that can be adopted to promote the development of metacognition among higher education learners.