Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring

A New Area of Cognitive—Developmental Inquiry

JOHN H. FLAVELL Stanford University

Preschool and elementary school children wereasked to study a set of items until they were surethey could recall them perfectly (Flavell, Fried-richs, & Hoyt, 1970). The older subjects studiedfor a while, said they were ready, and usuallywere, that is, they showed perfect recall. Theyounger children studied for a while, said theywere ready, and usually were not. In anotherstudy, elementary school children were asked tohelp the experimenter evaluate the communicativeadequacy of verbal instructions, indicating anyomissions and obscurities (Markman, 1977). Al-though the instructions were riddled with blatantomissions and obscurities, the younger subjectswere surprisingly poor at detecting them. Theyincorrectly thought they had understood and couldfollow the instructions, much as their counterpartsin the study by Flavell et al. (1970) incorrectlythought they had memorized and could recall theitems.

Results such as these have suggested that youngchildren are quite limited in their knowledge andcognition about cognitive phenomena, or in theirmetacognition, and do relatively little monitoringof their own memory, comprehension, and othercognitive enterprises (see, e.g., Brown, 1978; Fla-vell, 1978; Flavell & Wellman, 1977; Kreutzer,Leonard, & Flavell, 1975; Flavell, Note 1, Note 2,Note 3; Markman, Note 4). Investigators haverecently concluded that metacognition plays animportant role in oral communication of informa-tion, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, readingcomprehension, writing, language acquisition, at-tention, memory, problem solving, social cognition,and, various types of self-control and self-instruc-tion; there are also clear indications that ideasabout metacognition are beginning to make con-tact with similar ideas in the areas of social learn-ing theory, cognitive behavior modification, per-sonalty development, and education (Flavell, Note1, Note 2, Note 3). Thus, the nature and de-

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velopment of metacognition and of cognitive mon-itoring/regulation is currently emerging as an in-teresting and promising new area of investigation.What might there be for a child or adolescent tolearn in this area? That is, what adultlike knowl-edge and behavior might constitute the develop-mental target here, toward which the child gradu-ally progresses? The following model is my at-tempt to answer this question. For further detailsabout the model see my papers on the subject(Flavell, Note 2, Note 3).

A Model of Cognitive MonitoringI believe that the monitoring of a wide variety ofcognitive enterprises occurs through the actions ofand interactions among four classes of phenomena:(a) metacognitive knowledge, (b) metacognitiveexperiences, (c) goals (or tasks), and (d) actions(or strategies). Metacognitive knowledge is thatsegment of your (a child's, an adult's) storedworld knowledge that has to do with people ascognitive creatures and with their diverse cognitivetasks, goals, actions, and experiences. An examplewould be a child's acquired belief that unlike manyof her friends, she is better at arithmetic than atspelling. Metacognitive experiences are any con-scious cognitive or affective experiences that ac-company and pertain to any intellectual enter-prise. An example would be the sudden feelingthat you do not understand something anotherperson just said. I assume that metacognitiveknowledge and metacognitive experiences differfrom other kinds only in their content and func-tion, not in their form or quality. Goals (or tasks)

The preparation of this essay was supported by NationalInstitute of Child Health and Human Development GrantNDMH 10429.

Requests for reprints should be sent to John H. Flavell,Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford,California 94305.

Vol. 34, No. 10,906-911

refer to the objectives of a cognitive enterprise.Actions (or strategies) refer to the cognitions orother behaviors employed to achieve them. Be-low, I pay particular attention to the nature andfunctions of metacognitive knowledge and meta-cognitive experiences, with goals and actions dis-cussed in the course of describing these first two.

METACOONITIVE KNOWLEDGE

Metacognitive knowledge consists primarily ofknowledge or beliefs about what factors or vari-ables act and interact in what ways to affect thecourse and outcome of cognitive enterprises.There are three major categories of these factors orvariables—person, task, and strategy.

The person category encompasses everythingthat you could come to believe about the natureof yourself and other people as cognitive pro-cessors. It can be further subcategorized into be-liefs about intraindividual differences, interindivid-ual differences, and universals of cognition. Ex-amples of the first and second subcategories wouldbe, respectively, your belief (a) that you can learnmost things better by listening than by reading,and (b) that one of your friends is more sociallysensitive than another. The following are pos-sible examples of beliefs about universal proper-ties of cognition that the children might graduallyacquire. They could learn that there are variousdegrees and kinds of understanding (attending,remembering, communicating, problem solving,etc.). You may not understand some person orthing you hear, see, or read about if you do notattend closely—and also, sometimes, even if you doattend closely. Moreover, you can fail to under-stand something or someone in two different ways:(a) by not achieving any coherent representationat all, or (b) by understanding incorrectly, thatis, misunderstanding. The growing individual willalso learn that it can sometimes be difficult to de-termine how well you know or remember a socialor nonsocial object of cognition, for example,whether you know it well enough to reach somesocial or nonsocial goal involving that object.There is the further insight that how well youunderstand something now may not be an accuratepredictor of how well you will understand it later.For instance, you may forget later what you caneasily bring to mind now, and you may rememberlater what you cannot bring to mind now. I thinksuch tacit beliefs may play important roles in thecognitive enterprises of older children and adults

the world over and that the acquisition of thesebeliefs would be interesting to study.

One subcategory of the task category concernsthe information available to you during a cogni-tive enterprise. It could be abundant or meager,familiar or unfamiliar, redundant or denselypacked, well or poorly organized, delivered in thismanner or at that pace, interesting or dull, trust-worthy or untrustworthy, and so on. The meta-cognitive knowledge in this subcategory is an un-derstanding of what such variations imply for howthe cognitive enterprise should best be managed andhow successful you are likely to be in achievingits goal. To take a social-cognitive example, thechild needs to learn that the quantity and qualityof available information can sometimes be insuf-ficient to warrant confident judgments about whatanother person is really like. Another subcategoryincludes metacognitive knowledge about task de-mands or goals. The child will come to know thatsome cognitive enterprises are more demandingand difficult than others, even given the sameavailable information. For example, it is easierto recall the gist of a story than its exact wording.

As for the strategy category, there is a greatdeal of knowledge that could be acquired concern-ing what strategies are likely to be effective inachieving what subgoals and goals in what sorts ofcognitive undertakings. The child may come tobelieve, for example, that one good way to learnand retain many bodies of information is to payparticular attention to the main points and try torepeat them to yourself in your own words. As isshown below, it is possible to acquire metacogni-tive strategies as well as cognitive ones.

Finally, most metacognitive knowledge actuallyconcerns interactions or combinations among twoor three of these three types of variables. Toillustrate a combination involving all three, youmight believe that you (unlike your brother)should use Strategy A (rather than Strategy B)in Task X (as contrasted with Task Y).

Several things follow from the assumption, madeabove, that metacognitive knowledge is not funda-mentally different from other knowledge stored inlong-term memory. Thus, a segment of it may beactivated as the result of a deliberate, consciousmemory search, for example, for an effective strat-egy. On the other hand, and no doubt more com-monly, the segment may be activated unintention-ally and automatically by retrieval cues in thetask situation. However activated, it may andprobably often does influence the course of the

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cognitive enterprise without itself entering con-sciousness. Alternatively, it may become or giverise to a conscious experience (called a metacog-nitive experience in the present model of cognitivemonitoring). Finally, and again like any otherbody of knowledge children acquire, it can beinaccurate, can fail to be activated when needed,can fail to have much or any influence when acti-vated, and can fail to have a beneficial or adaptiveeffect when influential. I believe that metacogni-tive knowledge can have a number of concrete andimportant effects on the cognitive enterprises ofchildren and adults. It can lead you to select,'evaluate, revise, and abandon cognitive tasks,goals, and strategies in light of their relationshipswith one another and with your own abilities andinterests with respect to that enterprise. Similarly,it can lead to any of a wide variety of metacogni-tive experiences concerning self, tasks, goals, andstrategies, and can also help you interpret themeaning and behavioral implications of these meta-cognitive experiences.

METACOGNITIVE EXPERIENCES

Metacognitive experiences can be brief or lengthyin duration, simple or complex in content. Toillustrate, you may experience a momentary senseof puzzlement that you subsequently ignore, oryou may wonder for some time whether you reallyunderstand what another person is up to. Theseexperiences can also occur at any time before,after, or during a cognitive enterprise. For in-stance, you may feel that you are liable to failin some upcoming enterprise, or that you did verywell indeed in some previous one. Many meta-cognitive experiences have to do with where youare in an enterprise and what sort of progress youare making or are likely to make: You believe/feelthat you have almost memorized those instructions,are not adequately communicating how you feelto your friend, are suddenly stymied in your at-tempt to understand something you are reading,have just begun to solve what you sense will bean easy problem, and so forth.

My present guess is that metacognitive experi-ences are especially likely to occur in situationsthat stimulate a lot of careful, highly consciousthinking: in a job or school task that expresslydemands that'kind of thinking; in novel roles orsituations, where every major step you take re-quires planning beforehand and evaluation after-wards; where decisions and actions are at once

weighty and risky; where high affective arousal orother inhibitors of reflective thinking are absent(cf. Langer, 1978). Such situations provide manyopportunities for thoughts and feelings about yourown thinking to arise and, in many cases, call forthe kind of quality control that metacognitive ex-periences can help supply.

Some metacognitive experiences are best de-scribed as items of metacognitive knowledge thathave entered consciousness. As one example, whilewrestling with some stubborn problem, you sud-denly recall another problem very like it that yousolved thus and so. Some metacognitive experi-ences clearly cannot be described that way, how-ever. For instance, the feeling that you are stillfar from your goal is not in itself a segment ofmetacognitive knowledge, although what you makeof that feeling and what you do about it wouldundoubtedly be informed and guided by yourmetacognitive knowledge. Thus, metacognitiveknowledge and metacognitive experiences formpartially overlapping sets: Some experiences havesuch knowledge as their content and some do not;some knowledge may become conscious and com-prise such experiences and some may never do so.

Metacognitive experiences can have very im-portant effects on cognitive goals or tasks, meta-cognitive, knowledge, and cognitive actions orstrategies. First, they can lead you to establishnew goals and to revise or abandon old ones.Experiences of puzzlement or failure can have anyof these effects, for example.

Second, metacognitive experiences can affectyour metacognitive knowledge base by adding to it,deleting from it, or revising it. You can observerelationships among goals, means, metacognitiveexperiences, and task outcomes and—Piagetianfashion—assimilate these observations to yourexisting metacognitive knowledge and accommo-date the knowledge to the observations. Althoughmetacognitive knowledge can undoubtedly undergoat least some modification without metacognitiveexperiences, I suspect that these experiences play amajor role in its development during childhoodand adolescence.

Finally, metacognitive experiences can activatestrategies aimed at either of two types of goals—cognitive or metacognitive. As an example of theformer, you sense (metacognitive experience) thatyou do not yet know a certain chapter in yourtext well enough to pass tomorrow's exam, so youread it through once more (cognitive strategy,aimed at the straightforward cognitive goal of

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simply improving your knowledge). As an ex-ample of the latter, you wonder (metacognitiveexperience) if you understand the chapter wellenough to pass tomorrow's' exam, so you try tofind out by asking yourself questions about it andnoting how well you are able to answer them(metacognitive strategy, aimed at the metacogni-tive goal of assessing your knowledge, and thereby,of generating another metacognitive experience).Cognitive strategies are invoked to make cognitiveprogress, metacognitive strategies to monitor it.However, it is possible in some cases for the samestrategy to be invoked for either purpose and also,regardless of why it was invoked, for it to achieveboth goals. For instance, you could have askedyourself questions about the chapter with thedeliberate aim of improving your knowledge ratherthan monitoring it, and even if your aim had beento monitor rather than to improve it, an improve-ment in your knowledge as well as an assessmentof its quality would likely result. I am arguing,then, that your store of metacognitive knowledgeis apt to contain knowledge of metacognitivestrategies as well as of cognitive ones. Skimminga set of directions to get a rough idea of how hardthey are going to be to follow or remember is ametacognitive strategy. Another is to paraphrasealoud what someone has just told you to see ifshe will agree that that is, in fact, just what shemeant. A third is to add a column of figures asecond time to ensure that your total is accurate.

Recall that according to this model, the moni-toring of cognitive enterprises proceeds throughthe actions of and interactions among metacogni-tive knowledge, metacognitive experiences, goals/tasks, and actions/strategies. A hypothetical buttrue-to-life example of this dynamic interplay atwork might be a useful way of concluding thissummary of the model. Let us begin at the pointwhere some self-imposed or externally imposedtask and goal are established, Your existing meta-cognitive knowledge concerning this class of goalsleads to the conscious metacognitive experiencethat this goal will be difficult to achieve. Thatmetacognitive experience, combined with additionalmetacognitive knowledge, causes you to select anduse the cognitive strategy of asking questions ofknowledgeable other people. Their answers toyour questions trigger additional metacognitive ex-periences about how the endeavor is faring. Theseexperiences, again informed and guided by perti-nent metacognitive knowledge, instigate the meta-cognitive strategies of surveying all that you have

learned to see if it fits together into a coherentwhole, if it seems plausible and consistent withyour prior knowledge and expectations, and if itprovides an avenue to the goal. This survey turnsup difficulties on one or more of these points, withthe consequent activation by metacognitive knowl-edge and experiences of the same or different cog-nitive and/or metacognitive strategies, and sothe interplay continues until the enterprise comesto an end.

Developmental and EducationalImplicationsThis model suggests the existence of a number ofpossible developments that researchers might findit worthwhile to investigate (Flavell, Note 3).In the case of universals (person category of meta-cognitive knowledge), for instance, children mightat first distinguish only between understanding andnot understanding things; they might know onlythat inputs sometimes lead them to feel puzzled,confused, unable to act, uncertain about what isintended or meant, and that they sometimes leadto the absence of these feelings, to a clear repre-sentation of something, to a definite sense Of whatthey should do next. The distinction, within thelatter state, between accurate or real understand-ing and inaccurate or illusory understanding mayonly be acquired after this initial, more basic dif-ferentiation has been made. The acquisition ofthe second distinction may then pave the way forstill more sophisticated metacognitive knowledge inthis area; possible examples include the recogni-tion that accuracy of understanding can sometimesbe hard to attain and to assess, and knowledgeof some of the person variables that can decreaseaccuracy, such as personal biases, intense affect,and mental or physical illness. Additional devel-opmental hypotheses can be derived from otherparts of the model. Here as elsewhere (see Gel-man, 1979, this issue), it will naturally be veryimportant to try to discover the early competenciesthat serve as building blocks for subsequent ac-quisitions rather than merely cataloging the youngchild's metacognitive lacks and inadequacies. Wealso need to try to explain development in thisarea as well as to describe it, but there is little tosay about explanatory factors at present (Flavell,Notel).

For those with educational interests who wouldrather assist development than describe and ex-plain it, I think there is a very great deal that is

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worth assisting in this area. It is certainly truethat some basic preliminary questions need an-swers. For example, how much good does cogni-tive monitoring Actually do us in various types ofcognitive enterprises? Also, might it not even domore harm than good, especially if used in excessor nonselectively? Think of the feckless obses-sive, paralyzed by incessant critical evaluation ofhis own judgments and decisions.

Such questions suggest legitimate caveats abouteducational interventions in this area. Lack ofhard evidence notwithstanding, however, I am ab-solutely convinced that there is, overall, far toolittle rather than enough or too much cognitivemonitoring in this world. This is true for adultsas well as for children, but it is especially truefor children. For example, I find it hard to be-lieve that children who do more cognitive monitor-ing would not learn better both in and out ofschool than children who do less. I also thinkthat increasing the quantity and quality of chil-dren's metacognitive knowledge and monitoringskills through systematic training may be feasibleas well as desirable (Flavell, Note 2). To illus-trate what may be feasible here, Brown, Campione,and Barclay (Note 5) trained educable retardedchildren (mental age = 8 years) in self-testingstrategies for assessing and checking their readinessto recall errorlessly by rote a list of unrelatedwords—the same type of cognitive monitoring taskthat was described in the first sentence of thisarticle. One year later, the subjects spontane-ously used these metacognitive strategies whenconfronted with the same task and, even more im-pressively, appeared to apply modifications of thesestrategies effectively to the quite different memorytask of recalling the gist of prose passages. Brown,Campione, and others (e.g., Baker, Note 6) at theUniversity of Illinois Center for Research in Read-ing are currently doing research ultimately aimedat finding out how children may be effectivelytaught to monitor their comprehension, especiallywhile reading. Psychologists in other laboratorieshave also begun to do research on similar problems(e.g., Meichenbaum & Asarnow, 1979; Forrest&Barron,Note7).

I can also at least imagine trying to teach chil-dren and adolescents to monitor their cognition incommunication and other social settings (cf. Fla-vell, Note 2). In many real-life situations, themonitoring problem is not to determine how wellyou understand what a message means but to de-termine how much you ought to believe it or do

what it says to do. I am thinking of the persua-sive appeals the young receive from all quarters tosmoke, drink, take drugs, commit aggressive orcriminal acts, have casual sex without contracep-tives, have or not have the casual babies that oftenresult, quit school, and become unthinking fol-lowers of this year's flaky cults, sects, and move-ments. (Feel free to revise this list in accordancewith your own values and prejudices.) Perhapsit is stretching the meanings of metacognition andcognitive monitoring too far to include the criticalappraisal of message source, quality of appeal,and probable consequences needed to cope withthese inputs sensibly, but I do not think so. It isat least conceivable that the ideas currently brew-ing in this area could someday be parlayed intoa method of teaching children (and adults) tomake wise and thoughtful life decisions as well asto comprehend and learn better in formal educa-tional settings.

REFERENCE NOTES

1. Flavell, J. H. Metacognition. In E. Langer (Chair),Current perspectives on awareness and cognitive pro-cesses. Symposium presented at the meeting of theAmerican Psychological Association, Toronto, August1978.

2. Flavell, J. H. Cognitive monitoring. Paper presentedat the Conference on Children's Oral CommunicationSkills, University of Wisconsin, October 1978.

3. Flavell, J. H. Monitoring social-cognitive enterprises:Something else that may develop in the area of social

cognition. Paper prepared for the Social Science Re-search Council Committee on Social and Affective De-velopment During Childhood, January 1979.

4. Markman, E. M. Comprehension monitoring. Paperpresented at the Conference on Children's Oral Com-munication Skills, University of Wisconsin, October 1978.

5. Brown, A. L., Campione, J. C., & Barclay, C. R. Train-ing self-checking routines for estimating test readiness:Generalization from list learning to prose recall. Un-published manuscript, University of Illinois, 1978.

6. Baker, L. Do I understand or do I not understand:That is the question. Unpublished manuscript, Univer-sity of Illinois, 1978.

7. Forrest, D, L., & Barron, R. W. Metacognitive aspectsof the development of reading skills. Paper presentedat the meeting of the Society for Research in ChildDevelopment, New Orleans, March 1977.

REFERENCES

Brown, A. L. Knowing when, where, and how to re-member: A problem of metacognition. In R. Glaser(Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology. NewYork: Halsted Press, 1978.

Flavell, J. H. Metacognitive development. In J. M.Scandura & C. J. Brainerd (Eds.), Structural/processtheories of complex human behavior. Alphen a. d.Rijn, The Netherlands: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1978.

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Flavell, J. H., Friedrichs, A. G., & Hoyt, J. D. Develop-mental changes in memorization processes. CognitivePsychology, ,1970, 1, 324-340.

Flavell, J. H., & Wellman, H. M. Metamemory. In R.V. Kail & J. W. Hagen (Eds.), Perspectives on thedevelopment of memory and cognition, Hillsdale, N.J.:Erlbaum, 1977.

Gelraan, R, Preschool thought. American Psychologist,1979, 34, 900-905.

Kreutzer, M. A., Leonard, C., & Flavell, J. H. An inter-view study of children's knowledge about memory.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child De-velopment, 1975, 40(1, Serial No. 159).

Langer, E. J. Rethinking the role of thought in socialinteraction. In J. H. Harvey, W. J. Ickes, & R. F.Kidd (Eds.), New directions in attribution research(Vol. 2). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1978.

Markman, E: M. Realizing that you don't understand:A preliminary investigation. Child Development, 1977,48, 986-992.

Meichenbaum, D., & Asarnow, J. Cognitive-behaviormodification and metacognitive development: Implica-tions for the classroom. In P. Kendall & S. Hollon(Eds.), Cognitive-behavioral interventions: Theory, re-search and procedures. New York: Academic Press,1979.

Paul J. Cryan

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