Flavell (1979) Metacognition Cognitive Monitoring

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refer to the objectives of a cognitive enterprise.Actions (o r strategies) refer to the cognitions orother behaviors employed to achieve them. Be-low, I pay particular attention to the nature andfunctions of metacognitive knowledge an d meta-cognitive experiences, with goals and actions dis-cussed in the course of describing these first two.M ET A C OON I T I V E K N OWL ED G EMetacogni t ive knowledge consists primarily ofknowledge or beliefs about what factors or vari-ables act and interact in what ways to affect th ecourse an d outcome of cognitive enterprises.There ar e three major categories of these factorsorvariables person, task and strategy.

The person category encompasses everythingthat you could come to believe about the natureof yourself an d 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 th e children might graduallyacquire. They could learn that there are variousdegrees an d 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 closelyand 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-te rmine how well you know or remember a socialor nonsocial object of cognition, fo r example,whether yo u 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 howwell youwill understand it later.For instance, you may forget later what you caneasily bring to mind now, and you may rememberlater what you cannot bring tomind now. I thinksuch tacit beliefs may play important roles in thecognitive enterprises of older children an d adults

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

One subcategory of the task category concernsthe information available to you during a cogni-t ive enterprise. It could be abundant or meager,familiar or unfami l ia r , 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-ders tanding of what such variations imply for howth e cognitive enterprise should best bemanaged andhow successful you are likely to be in achievingits goal. To take a social-cognitive example, thechild needs to learn that th e quantity and qualityof available informat ion ca n sometimes be insuf-ficient to warrant confident judgments about whatanother person is really like. Another subcategoryincludes metacognitive knowledge about task de-mandsor goals. The child will cometo knowthatsome cognitive enterprises are more demandingand difficult than others, even given th e sameavailable informat ion. For example, it is easierto recall th e gist of a story than its exact wording.

A s for the strategy category, there is a greatdeal of knowledge that could be acquired concern-in g what strategies are likely to be effective inachievingwhat subgoals an d goals in what sorts ofcognitive undertakings. The child m ay come tobelieve, for example, that one good way to learnand retain many bodies of information is to paypart icular attention to the main points and try torepeat them to yourself in your ow nwords. 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 tw oor 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 withTask Y) .Several things follow from th e 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, fo r 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 th e course of theAMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST OCTOBER 1979 907


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cognitive enterprise without itself entering con-sciousness. A lternativ ely, it ma y become or giverise to a conscious experience (called a metacog-nitive experience in the present model of cognitivemoni to r ing) . Finally, and again like any otherbody of knowledge children acquire, it can beinaccurate, can fail to be activated when needed,ca n fail to have much or any influence when acti-vated, and can fail to have a beneficial or adaptiveeffect w hen influential. I believe that metacogni-tive knowledgeca n have a number of concrete an dimportant 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 tothat enterprise. Sim ilarly,it can lead to any of a wide variety of metacogni-tive experiences concerning self, tasks, goals, andstrategies, and can also help you interpret th emeaning an d behavioral implications of these meta-cognitiveexperiences.ME T A CO GNI T I V E E X P E R I E N C E SMetacognitive experiences can be brief or lengthyin duration, simple or complex in content. Toillustrate, you may experience a momentary senseof puzzlement that yo u subsequently ignore, oryou may wonder fo r some time whether you reallyunderstand what another person is up to. Theseexperiences can also occur at any time before,after , or durin g 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. M any 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 think ing ar e absent(cf. Langer , 1978). Such s i tuations provide ma nyopportunit ies fo r thoughts and feelings about yourow n thinking to arise and, in many cases, call fo rth e kind of quality control that metacognitive ex-periences can help supply.

Some metacognitive experiences ar e best de-scribed as items of metacogn it ive knowledge thathave entered consciousness. As one example, whilewrestling w ith some stubborn problem , you sud-denly recall another problem very like it that yousolved thus and so. Some metacogn itive 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 ofmetacognit ive knowledge, a l though w hat you m a k eof 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 knowledgeas their content and some do not;some know ledge 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, an d cognitive actions orstrategies. First, they can lead you to establishne w goals and to revise or abandon old ones.Experiences of puzzlement or failure ca n have an yoftheseeffects, for example.

Second, metacognitive experiences ca n affectyour metacognitive knowledge base by adding to it,deleting from it, or revising it. You can observerelationships among goals, means, metacognitiveexperiences, and task outcomes andPiaget ianfashionassimilate these observations to yourexisting metacognitive knowledge and accommo-date th e knowledge to the observations. Althou ghmetacognitive 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 goalscognitive 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 th e 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 insome 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 ofimproving your knowledge ratherthan monitoring it, and evenif your aim had beento monitor rather than to improve it, an improve-ment in your knowledgeas 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 ofdirections 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 thiss u m m a r y of the model. Let us begin at the pointwhere some self-imposed or externally imposedtaskand 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 abouthow 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 an d consistent withyour prior knowledge an d expectations, and if itprovides an avenue to the goal. This survey turnsup difficulties on one or more of these points, withth e consequent activation by metacognitive knowl-edge an d 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 numberofpossible developments that researchers might findit worthwhile to investigate (Flavell, Note 3).In the case ofuniversals (person category of meta-cogni t ive knowledge) , fo r 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 Ofwhatthey should do next. The distinction, within thelatter state, between accurate or real understand-in g 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 knowledgeinthis area; possible examples include the recogni-tion that accuracy of understanding ca n sometimesbe hard to attain and to assess, and knowledgeof some of the person variables that ca n decreaseaccuracy, such as personal biases, intense affect,an d 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 veryimpor tan t to try to discover the early competenciesthat serve as building blocks fo r subsequent ac-quisitions rather than merely cataloging theyoungchild'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 isAMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST OCTOBER 1979 909


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wor th assisting in this area. It is certainly truethat some basic preliminary questions need an-swers. For example, how much good does cogni-tive monitoringA ctually 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 cognitivemonitor ing in this world. This is true fo r adultsas well as for children, but it is especially truefor children. For example, I find it hard to be-lieve that children who domore cognitive monitor-in g would not learn better both in and out ofschool than children who do less. I also thinkthat increasing th e 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-tratewhat may befeasible here, Brown,Campione,and Barclay (Note 5 ) trained educable retardedchildren (mental age = 8 years) in self-testingstrategies fo rassessing and checking their readinessto recall errorlessly by rote a list of unrelatedwordsthe same type of cognitive monitoring taskthat w as described in the first sentence of thisarticle. One year later, the subjects spontane-ously used these metacognitive strategies whenconfronted with th e same task and, even more im -pressively, appeared toapplymodificationsofthesestrategies effectively to the quite different memorytask of recallingthe gist of prose passages. Brown,Campione, and others (e.g., Baker, Note 6) at theUniversity of Illinois Center fo r Research in Read-in g 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 incommunica t ion and other social settings (cf. Fla-vell, Note 2). In many real-life situations, th emonitor ing 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 th e young receive from all quarters tosmoke, drink, take drugs, commit aggressive orcr iminal acts, have casual sex without contracep-tives, have or not havethe casual babies that oftenresult , quit school, an d become unthinking fol-lowers of this year s flaky cults, sects, an d move-ments. (Feel free to revise this list in accordancewith your own values and prejudices.) Perhapsit is stretching th e meanings of metacognition andcognitive monitoringtoo far to include th e 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 conceivablethat the ideas currently brew-ing in this area could someday be parlayed intoa method of teaching children (and adults) toma ke wise an d thought ful life decisions as well asto comprehend and learn better in formal educa-tional settings.

R E F E R E N C E NOTES1. 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, August

1 9 7 8 .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 ma y develop in the area of socialcognition. 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, October1978.5. 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. U n-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 aspectso the development of reading skills. Paper presentedat the meeting of the Society for Research in ChildDevelopment, New Orleans, March 1977.

R E F E R E N C E SBrown, 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, Th e Netherlands: Sijthoff Noordhoff, 1978.910 O C T O B E R 1979 A M E R I C A N P S Y C H O L O G I S T


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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. Metamemor y . In R.V. Kail J. W . Hagen (Eds.), Perspectives on thedevelopment of memory an d cognition, Hillsdale, N.J.:Erlbaum, 1977.Gelraan, R, Preschool tho ug ht. American Psychologist,1 9 7 9 , 34, 900-905.Kreutzer , M . A., Leon ard, 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 th e role of thought in socialinteraction. In J. H. Harvey, W. J. Ickes, & R. F.Kidd (Eds.), New directions in attribution research V o l . 2). Hillsdale, N.J.: E rlbaum , 1978.Mar kman, E: M. Realizing that you don't unders tand:A preliminary investigation. Child Development, 1977,48 , 986-992.Me ic he nba um, D., Asa rnow , J. Cognitive-behaviormodification and metacognitive development: Implica-tions for the classroom. In P. Kendall S. Hollo n(Eds.), Cognitive-behavioral interventions: Theory, re -search an d procedures. N ew York: Academic Press,1 9 7 9 .

Paul J Cryan

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Flavell (1979) Metacognition Cognitive Monitoring

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