Introduction

Research about metacognition and its implications for learning and instruction have become a central issue in education. The call for teaching metacognitive skills is considered one of the three main implications for instruction that emerged from over three decades of research about how people learn; the two additional implications being: (a) the call for teachers to draw out and consider students’ preexisting understandings, and (b) the call to replace superficial coverage of all topics in a subject area with in-depth coverage of fewer topics that allows key concepts in that discipline to be understood. Metacognition is significant across the curriculum and an emphasis on metacognition needs to accompany instruction in each of the school disciplines (Bransford et al. 2000).