Metacognition Explained: Can the Arts Strengthen How Children Learn?
What is metacognition? Can the arts help?
Metacognition is often defined as “thinking about thinking”. In education, it’s seen as one of the three components of self-regulated learning and it involves encouraging pupils to think explicitly about their own learning. Metacognition is also relevant when doing arts subjects. It helps children to think about what they are doing if they are asked questions about how well they have done something or how could they improve what they have done.
The term was introduced in 1976 by US developmental psychologist John Flavell, who viewed it as “learners’ knowledge of their own cognition” – defining it as “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena”.
Recently metacognition has been talked about in education a great deal
Metacognition is fast becoming one of the most popular teaching and learning approaches in English schools. The EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) has produced a Teaching and Learning Toolkit, that is rated as “high impact for very low cost”, with a range of evidence telling teachers that developing these skills in pupils can lead to learning gains. This toolkit has recently (Nov 2025) been updated and is available online.
The research suggests that disadvantaged pupils can benefit most from effective metacognition teaching.
However, beyond a simple definition of “learning to learn”, it can be hard to pin down what effective metacognition teaching looks like in the classroom. To have the desired impact on pupil progress, it’s crucial that teachers and school leaders are guided by pointers from the research base when deciding how to implement this approach in their setting.
Metacognitive methods require pupils to take on more independence for their learning, which can’t happen without appropriate support. Immediately handing over independence to pupils – expecting them to know instinctively how to approach a task metacognitively – is unlikely to have the desired impact.
Instead, teachers need to explicitly teach strategies to help pupils plan, monitor and evaluate specific aspects of their learning. This can be particularly effective when applied to challenging, curriculum-related tasks.
With explicit teaching and specific feedback, all pupils are more likely to use metacognitive strategies independently and habitually, helping them to manage their own learning and overcome challenges with increased resilience in the future.
A few simple strategies can help:
The first is to “talk more about less”: here, teachers should try considering fewer questions or tasks during a lesson but talking about these in significantly greater depth. Talking about ideas in detail means that the thinking taking place in the classroom becomes more visible, helping teachers to spot and address misconceptions.
“Thinking out loud”: Teachers can think aloud while modelling, writing, or reflecting on a passage of text, for example. This will help to broaden children’s understanding of the types of thinking they can draw upon and the strategies that teachers (including artists and musicians), as more advanced learners, use in their own work.
“Make questions key”: this shifts emphasis from the answer or learning outcome towards the process used to achieve it. Questions like “how do you know?”, “what could you do to improve?”, “what went well, and why?” and “what helped you to be successful today?” encourage children to explain their reasoning.
