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There are no silver bullets in education but if there ever was a secret weapon educators can deploy to improve student learning, it’s metacognition. Metacognition is a meta-level awareness of cognitive processes, including the process of learning.In our role as disciplinary experts, we focus on what students need to learn. What if we also helped them understand how to learn? Instructors often assume that college students already know how to understand, monitor, and shape their learning process. This may be true for some students, especially those who already enjoy high levels of educational privilege; but many enter college with weak metacognitive skills or erroneous metacognitive models that actively interfere with their learning. Those students may mistake gaps in academic know-how for a lack of academic aptitude and drop out of courses and majors in which they were perfectly capable of succeeding. Even students who do possess robust metacognitive skills need to adjust their strategies in response to the new demands of university-level studies and/or the specialized demands of individual disciplines and courses. Metacognitive awareness can help all students become more intentional, focused, and effective learners.

In her book  (2015), Saundra McGuire offers numerous stories of successful metacognitive interventions in higher education and beyond. Perhaps the most dramatic is an AP Physics course where the class average went from 66.9% on the first exam, to 95.6% on the last! We can help students develop stronger metacognitive skills by sharing insights from the science of learning, building good study habits into the structure of our courses, and making time for (unrushed) reflection. 

Teach your students basic study skills.

 Do your students know that passively re-reading their textbooks/notes is much less effective than actively retrieving course content from memory (a.k.a. retrieval practice)? Do they know they should space out their study sessions (spaced practice) and continue returning to older material (interleaving)? Do they understand that struggling with course material is not a sign they are failing to learn but, on the contrary, a sign that they are learning? Do they know how much professional writers revise their drafts? Are they aware of how having a fixed mindset (as opposed to growth mindset) can interfere with their academic success? Do they understand the key difference between studying and learning? You can use these questions to determine which study skills might be needed in your course. Then, you can easily weave in just-in-time study skill lessons throughout your class with minimal effort by adding metacognitive tips to assignment prompts, LMS announcements, or in-class reminders, to help your students become better and more confident learners!

Bake good learning habits into your class—and let your students know

While telling students how to learn can be beneficial, building good learning strategies into the structure of your course can be transformative. Consider adapting some of the following strategies—and don’t forget to let your students know why you did so! Reminding students why we have designed their learning experience in a certain way can help them become more aware of the skills practiced in our classes and encourage transferring those skills to new contexts.

• Help students see the power of retrieval practice by opening class with a brief quiz.
• Use interleaving by offering cumulative assessments.
• Promote spaced practice by spacing out low-stakes assignments.
• Train students to develop better academic reading skills by requiring annotations.
• Instill better time management by scaffolding longer assignments.
• Help students understand specific cognitive skills required in academic work (synthesis, analysis, evaluation, categorization, etc.) by clearly articulating them in assignment prompts.

Invest time in reflection

You can promote a more intentional approach to learning by building in reflection opportunities throughout your course. Those do not have to take up much class time: a one-minute check-in prompt at the end of a class or unit (“What was the greatest area of difficulty?” “What did you struggle with and why?””) or a five-minute  ("Which study strategies prepared you to do well on the questions you aced?” “Why do you think you didn’t do well on others?”) can yield valuable information for you and your students. Investing time in more in-depth reflection, ideally followed by whole-class discussion, can help students gain a more accurate and nuanced view of how learning works; overcome impostor syndrome (“I’m not the only one struggling with this!”); and learn from one another. Regular reflection develops the habit of thinking about the “how” in addition to the “what” of academic work, allowing students to become more effective, more intentional, and more confident learners.