METACOGNITION

Another important concept related to the development of fluent reading is that of metacognition or metacognitive awareness. Simply stated metacognition is knowing about knowing, thinking about thinking.

Metacognition is knowing "what we know" and "what we don't know." Just as an executive's job is management of an organization, a thinker's job is management of thinking, a learner's job is management of learning. The basic metacognitive strategies are:

Connecting new information to former knowledge.
Selecting thinking strategies deliberately.
Planning, monitoring, and evaluating thinking processes.


A thinking person is in charge of her behavior. She determines when it is necessary to use metacognitive strategies. She selects strategies to define a problem situation and researches alternative solutions. She tailors this search for information to constraints of time and energy. She monitors, controls and judges her thinking. She evaluates and decides when a problem is solved to a satisfactory degree or when the demands of daily living take a temporary or permanent higher priority. Learning how to learn, developing a repertoire of thinking processes which can be applied to solve problems, is a major goal of education.


Metacognitive activities, of course, vary according to the current cognitive processing task. For example, a student who is engaged in metacognition and critical thinking might be thinking about her thinking while she is thinking in order to improve her thinking. Luckily for us, metacognition as applied to the reading process is a slightly less layered process. Fluent readers might be thinking about their reading (comprehension and processing) while they are reading in order to improve their reading. As students transition from learning to read to reading to learn, reading is no longer an end in itself. Instead, learning specific information and then using that information to perform some task becomes the goal of reading. This type of reading involves a number of complex activities such as understanding and remembering the main idea of the selection, monitoring comprehension and learning, and knowing when and how to use fix-up strategies when there is abreakdown in comprehension.