Despite the consensus about the importance of self-regulated learning for academic as well as for lifelong learning, it is still poorly understood as to how teachers can most effectively support their students in enacting self-regulated learning. This article provides a framework about how self-regulated learning can be activated directly through…

Metacognitive skills refers to individual abilities for regulating and controlling learning behavior. Orientation, goal setting, planning, monitoring, and evaluation are manifestations of those skills. Given that metacognitive skills directly affect learning behavior, they are a strong predictor of learning performance. Students display a huge…

Various instruments for assessing metacognitive skills and strategy use exist. Off-line self-reports are questionnaires and interviews administered either before or after task performance, while on-line measures are gathered during task performance through thinking aloud or observation. Multi-method studies in reading have shown that off-line…

Teaching and assessing metacognitive activities are important educational objectives, and teachers are calling for efficient instruments. The advantages of questionnaires in measuring metacognitive activities are obvious, but serious validity issues appear. For example, correlations of questionnaire data with think-aloud measures are generally…

In the last decades, students increasingly have been placed in the role of active learners with responsibilities for their own learning. Students have to be able to plan their learning activities and execute them in a systematic and orderly way and to monitor and to evaluate their learning and to reflect on it. All aforementioned skills are…

Studies about metacognition, intelligence and learning have rendered equivocal results. The mixed model assumes joint as well as independent influences of intelligence and metacognition on learning results. In this study, intelligence was measured by standard tests for reasoning, spatial ability and memory. Participants were 13-year-old school…

This study shows the results of a two-year longitudinal study where the same participants were followed for two consecutive years as they enter secondary school (aged 12-14 years). The main issue was to investigate the development of both the quantity and the quality of metacognitive skills. Another issue was to establish whether the development…

The first objective of this study was to establish the relation between intellectual ability and metacognitive skillfulness as predictors of learning performance in young students (aged 12 years). Furthermore, the generality vs. domain-specificity of metacognitive skillfulness was investigated. Thirty-two first-year secondary-school students…

This article describes the construction of a hierarchical taxonomy of metacognitive activities for the interpretation of thinking-aloud protocols of students in secondary education, who studied texts on history and physics. After testing an initial elaborate taxonomy on a restricted number of protocols by multiple raters, it appeared that the…

Three models representing different relations between intellectual ability, metacognitive skills, and learning were compared. The conditions under which each of these models holds were investigated, on the basis of the threshold of problematicity theory [Elshout, J. J. (1987). Problem solving and education. In E. De Corte, H. Lodewijks, R.…