The Importance of Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning
Mar 11, 2025The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has found that students who are taught the skills of Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning and effectively apply them, make, on average, a staggering 7 months of additional progress over their peers in a school year.
This is the biggest impact of any intervention defined by the EEF.
Metacognition and self-regulation approaches to teaching support pupils to think about their own learning more explicitly, often by teaching them specific strategies for planning, monitoring, and evaluating their learning.
This teaching is usually designed to give pupils a repertoire of strategies to choose from and the skills to select the most suitable strategy for a given learning task.
Self-regulated learning can be broken into three essential components:
- cognition – the mental process involved in knowing, understanding, and learning;
- metacognition – often defined as ‘learning to learn’; and
- motivation – willingness to engage our metacognitive and cognitive skills.
The Key Findings of the EEF are as follows:
1. The potential impact of metacognition and self-regulation approaches is high (+7 months additional progress), although it can be difficult to realise this impact in practice as such methods require pupils to take greater responsibility for their learning and develop their understanding of what is required to succeed.
2. The evidence indicates that explicitly teaching strategies to help plan, monitor and evaluate specific aspects of their learning can be effective.
3. These approaches are more effective when they are applied to challenging tasks rooted in the usual curriculum content.
4. Teachers can demonstrate effective use of metacognitive and self-regulatory strategies by modelling their own thought processes. For example, teachers might explain their thinking when interpreting a text or solving a mathematical task, alongside promoting and developing metacognitive talk related to lesson objectives.
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/metacognition-and-self-regulationIf you are considering how best to support your child to make more progress in their learning, evidence suggests that this is more important than anything else. If you are looking for additional support outside of school, ensure that you find someone who knows how to teach these skills well, just as I do at Cambridge Quality Tuition.
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