Definition of metacognition, part 2

It was said that the concept of metacognition entered the field of cognitive psychology in 1976 with John Flavell. It should be remembered that in 1975, Ann Brown wrote a paper about “Knowing, knowing about knowing, knowing how to know“.

Flavell defined the word metacognition in quite general terms. Many have written new definitions trying to organize what metacognition exactly covers.

Ann Brown (1987, Metacognition, Executive Control, Self-Regulation, and other Mysterious Mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert and R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, Motivation, and Understanding Hillsdale New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 65-116) also distinguished between knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition.

1. Knowledge about cognition.
   • Know what you know: Brown named secondary ignorance the fact of one not being aware of one’s own knowledge. Not knowing what you know is secondary ignorance. My understanding of Brown paper is that the base of metacognition is being aware of self knowledge level or self ignorance level about something. For her this includes
     • metacomprehension, i.e. to know that you understood a question for instance;
     • evaluation about what can be deduced from knowledge;
     • evaluation of degree of certainty about knowledge;
     • prediction of the knowledge level reached, i.e. did I study enough to be able to remember what I’ve studied the day I take the test?
   • To know what is needed as knowledge: to accomplish a task one must identify what knowledge will needed (Brown, A.L., 1980, Metacognitive development and reading. In R.J. Spiro, B. Bruce & W.F. Brewer (Eds), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension (pp.453-479). Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; p. 460).
2. Regulation, or to know the utility of different intervention strategy, or in other words if someone is able to do so it means that this person is aware to change his/her behaviour when he/she mades a self judgment that his/her performance is not optimal.

The part that is most interesting in relation to confidence marking is of course when Brown includes with metacognitive knowledge the notion of self evaluating knowledge using the notion of degree of certainty.