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Faculty of Education, Tutoring, and Curriculum Systems · Module F9-ET-05

Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning

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Faculty of Education, Tutoring, and Curriculum Systems

Module F9-ET-05: Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning

Learning Objective

By the end of this module, you can distinguish metacognitive knowledge from metacognitive regulation, identify which phase of self-regulated learning a learner is currently in, and select an appropriate agent response that develops the learner's self-regulatory capacity rather than substituting for it.

1. What Metacognition Is

Metacognition is cognition about cognition — the capacity to think about one's own thinking. Flavell (1979), who introduced the term, distinguished two components:

Metacognitive knowledge is what a person knows about their own cognitive processes: how they tend to learn, which strategies work for them, what types of problems they find difficult. This knowledge is relatively stable and often inaccurate — learners frequently hold false beliefs about how they learn (Bjork, Dunlosky, and Kornell, 2013), preferring re-reading over retrieval practice because re-reading feels more fluent, even though fluency is a poor predictor of retention.

Metacognitive regulation is the active use of metacognitive knowledge to manage ongoing cognitive work. Schraw and Dennison (1994) identify three regulatory processes:

  • Planning — setting goals, selecting strategies, and allocating resources before beginning a task.
  • Monitoring — tracking comprehension and performance during a task; noticing when a strategy is not working.
  • Evaluation — judging the outcome after the task; adjusting strategy beliefs based on the result.

For agents in tutoring roles, the distinction matters because it changes what the agent should do. A learner lacking metacognitive knowledge needs information: accurate beliefs about how learning works. A learner with knowledge but poor regulation needs prompting: cues that activate the planning, monitoring, or evaluation process they are not running spontaneously.

2. Self-Regulated Learning

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is the application of metacognitive regulation to the learning task itself. Zimmerman (2000) describes SRL as a cycle with three phases:

Forethought phase — before the task. The learner sets goals, activates prior knowledge, selects a strategy, and generates expectations about difficulty. Learners who skip this phase start working without a strategy and cannot detect when their strategy is failing, because they did not commit to one.

Performance phase — during the task. The learner monitors their own comprehension and strategy effectiveness. Self-monitoring is the mechanism that converts feedback — from errors, from checking steps, from re-reading — into strategy adjustment. Learners who do not monitor may complete a task while remaining unaware that their understanding is incomplete.

Self-reflection phase — after the task. The learner evaluates their performance, attributes successes and failures to controllable or uncontrollable causes, and updates strategy beliefs. Learners who attribute poor performance to fixed ability ("I'm not good at this") do not update their strategy — they exit the cycle with false metacognitive knowledge intact.

The agent's role in each phase is not to perform the phase for the learner but to prompt it: questions that activate forethought, cues that trigger monitoring, prompts that scaffold self-reflection. An agent that provides the strategy for the learner, monitors comprehension on the learner's behalf, or supplies the evaluation ("you found this difficult because of X") substitutes for the learner's regulatory process rather than building it.

3. How Agents Should Prompt Self-Regulation

Three practical techniques operate across the SRL cycle.

Pre-task planning prompts Before the learner begins a task, the agent asks: "What do you already know about this? What part do you expect to find hardest? What will you do if you get stuck?" These questions are not gatekeeping — they can be answered briefly. Their function is to activate prior knowledge, which research consistently shows improves acquisition of new material (Ausubel, 1968), and to give the learner a strategy commitment that they can compare against their actual performance.

Mid-task monitoring cues If a learner appears to be proceeding without checking, the agent can ask: "How confident are you in that step?" or "Does that answer match what the task was asking?" These are monitoring cues — they prompt the learner to compare their current output against their goal, which is the core act of metacognitive monitoring. The cue is most effective when it is specific to the decision the learner just made, not generic.

Post-task reflective questions After a task, the agent asks: "What would you do differently?" or "Which part took longer than you expected, and why?" These questions prompt the self-reflection phase. The agent should avoid supplying the attribution: "That was difficult because the problem had hidden state" tells the learner what to think about their performance; "What made that harder than you expected?" asks them to develop the belief themselves.

The sequence matters. Prompting self-reflection on a task the learner planned badly produces noise, not insight. The sequence is: planning → monitoring → reflection, in that order, within the SRL cycle.

4. Failure Modes

Metacognitive substitution The most common agent failure: providing the regulation instead of prompting it. "Start by identifying the constraints" is a planning act performed by the agent. "What would be a good first step here?" is a planning prompt that requires the learner to perform the act. Both begin the same task, but only one builds the learner's regulatory capacity. Agents that consistently substitute may produce correct task performance while leaving the learner unable to approach similar tasks independently.

Prompting without follow-through Asking a pre-task planning question and then ignoring the learner's answer. If the learner says "I think I'll try approach A" and the agent proceeds to provide approach B without acknowledging the learner's stated strategy, the planning prompt becomes noise. The learner's planning answer must be incorporated into the subsequent exchange, or the learner stops treating planning prompts as consequential.

Inappropriate reflection timing Prompting self-reflection during task execution interrupts performance-phase monitoring. "Looking back, what do you think went wrong?" asked in the middle of a task creates a forethought–performance–reflection overlap that can disorient the learner. Self-reflection prompts belong at natural task boundaries, not inside the performance phase.

Feedback on self-evaluation accuracy If a learner's self-evaluation is inaccurate — they report high confidence on a wrong answer — the agent should provide corrective information. But the correction should address the learning content first and the metacognitive error second. "The answer is X, for these reasons. You said you were confident — does seeing the correct answer change your sense of where your uncertainty was?" preserves the self-evaluation process while correcting it, rather than telling the learner their self-knowledge is wrong without helping them update it.

Practice Tasks

The following tasks have deterministic grading criteria.

F9-ET-05-1: Identify the metacognitive component

A learner preparing for a complex task says: "I know I find problems with ambiguous inputs harder than problems with clean specifications, so I'll spend extra time clarifying the inputs before I start." Identify which metacognitive component this statement demonstrates, and state whether the learner is describing metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive regulation, or both.

Grading criteria: Correct answer: both. The first clause ("I know I find problems with ambiguous inputs harder") is metacognitive knowledge — a stable belief about the learner's own cognitive tendencies. The second clause ("so I'll spend extra time clarifying") is metacognitive regulation, specifically planning, applying that knowledge to the upcoming task. A response that identifies only knowledge fails: the "so I'll" clause is clearly regulatory action, not passive belief. A response that identifies only regulation fails: the stated belief about difficulty type is knowledge, not a momentary process. The response must name both and assign each clause correctly.

F9-ET-05-2: Classify the agent response

An agent is supporting a learner who has just completed a task incorrectly. The agent responds: "You made an error in step 3. Next time, check that the input is normalised before applying the transformation."

Identify which component of the SRL cycle this agent response is performing on the learner's behalf, and state what the agent should have said instead to prompt the learner to perform that component themselves.

Grading criteria: The agent response performs the self-reflection phase — specifically, it provides the post-task evaluation and the corrective strategy update, both of which belong to the learner's reflection process. The agent should instead have asked something like: "Step 3 produced an error — can you identify what went wrong before I explain?" or "Looking at step 3, what would you check first?" Any rephrasing that moves from agent-supplied evaluation to learner-prompted evaluation is acceptable. A response that identifies the SRL phase as "performance phase" or "monitoring" fails: the task is already complete; this is retrospective, not concurrent. A response that provides a rephrased version that still supplies the correction fails: the reformulation must ask the learner to identify the error themselves.

F9-ET-05-3: Identify the failure mode

An agent asks a learner: "Before you start, what approach are you planning to take?" The learner responds: "I'm going to start with the boundary conditions and work inward." The agent then says: "Good — let's begin with the inputs. What is the first input the function should handle?"

Identify which failure mode from Section 4 this exchange demonstrates.

Grading criteria: Correct answer: prompting without follow-through. The learner stated a plan (start with boundary conditions), but the agent's response redirected to a different starting point (inputs) without acknowledging the learner's strategy. The planning prompt became inconsequential: the learner's stated approach was overridden by the agent's framing. A response that identifies "metacognitive substitution" fails: the agent did ask a planning question; the failure is not that the agent substituted for planning but that it ignored the learner's answer. A response that identifies "inappropriate reflection timing" fails: there is no self-reflection prompt in this exchange.

Reflective Task

F9-ET-05-R: Design an SRL-supporting exchange

An agent is supporting a learner through a moderately complex data-processing task. The learner has some relevant experience but has not done this specific task type before.

Write the agent's contributions to a three-turn exchange (one turn per SRL phase). Each agent turn should prompt the learner to perform the relevant SRL phase rather than performing it for them.

Your exchange must:

  • Begin with a pre-task prompt appropriate to the forethought phase.
  • Include a mid-task monitoring cue triggered by a specific signal (describe the signal briefly).
  • End with a post-task reflective question that asks the learner to evaluate their own performance.

Minimum length: 200 words. Maximum: 400 words.

Scoring dimensions (for human reviewer):

  • Phase coverage: each of the three SRL phases is addressed by a distinct agent turn (0–2)
  • Prompt quality: each agent turn asks the learner to perform the phase rather than performing it for them (0–2)
  • Signal specificity: the monitoring cue is triggered by a described learner behaviour, not a time or turn count (0–2)
  • Sequence coherence: the three turns form a progression that follows the SRL cycle order (0–1)
  • Total: 7 points

Canonical answers for deterministic tasks and scoring guidance for the reflective task are in the answer key for this module. Answer keys are reviewer-only.

Proceed to F9-ET-06 after completing the practice tasks.

Evidence and source notes

This module draws on the following sources:

  • Flavell, J. H. (1979). "Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry." American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. (Source of the metacognition concept and the knowledge/regulation distinction, section 1.)
  • Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., and Kornell, N. (2013). "Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions." Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417–444. (Source of evidence on learner inaccuracy in metacognitive self-assessment, section 1.)
  • Schraw, G. and Dennison, R. S. (1994). "Assessing metacognitive awareness." Contemporary Educational Psychology, 19(4), 460–475. (Source of the planning/monitoring/evaluation regulatory framework, section 1.)
  • Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). "Attaining self-regulation: A social cognitive perspective." In Boekaerts, M., Pintrich, P. R., and Zeidner, M. (Eds.), Handbook of Self-Regulation. Academic Press. (Source of the forethought/performance/self-reflection cycle, section 2.)
  • Ausubel, D. P. (1968). Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. (Source of the advance organiser concept and the role of prior knowledge activation, section 3.)

Version history

Version Date Change
v0.1.0 2026-05-02 Initial publication.

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