How Aware Are You of Your Own Thinking?
Knowing how you think, and being able to steer it
Metacognition is thinking about your own thinking - knowing which strategies actually work for you, and being able to steer your attention and effort while you use them. Researchers split it into knowing how your mind works and actually managing it moment to moment, and the two do not always move together: plenty of people describe their own habits accurately and still fail to notice themselves drifting halfway through a task.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you generally approach learning or solving problems, not about one exam or one difficult week.
What it measures
Three facets drawn from the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory: knowledge of cognition (what you know about how you learn and think), planning (setting a strategy before you start) and monitoring and evaluation (checking your understanding while you work and afterwards). This is about thinking in general, not the specific study tactics measured by our study-approach test.
Based on: Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw & Dennison, 1994)
Possible results
Knowledge of cognition
Whether you know which strategies actually work for you.
Planning
Whether you set a strategy before you start, rather than midway through.
Monitoring and evaluation
Whether you notice confusion while it is happening, and check afterwards what worked.
Common questions
Is metacognition the same as intelligence?
No - they are related but separable. Metacognition is about managing whatever cognitive resources you have: knowing your own strengths and limits and steering your effort accordingly. A very capable person with poor metacognition can still study inefficiently or misjudge how well they understand something, while a moderately capable person with strong metacognition often outperforms them on tasks that reward planning and self-checking.
Can metacognitive skills be trained?
To some extent, and mostly through simple habits rather than general 'brain training': predicting how well you will do before a task and checking afterwards, explaining what you learned out loud or in writing, and deliberately trying more than one strategy on the same problem. These are the same behaviours the inventory asks about, which is part of why just taking a test like this one can nudge people toward noticing more.
Why do my knowledge and regulation scores sometimes disagree?
Because they are genuinely different skills. Knowing that you learn better from doing than from reading is a fact about yourself; actually stopping to plan and check yourself while you work is a habit. Research on the inventory finds meaningful gaps between the two are common, so a gap between your bars is normal and simply tells you where the easier improvement is - usually the regulation side, since it is more about routine than insight.
Sources
- Schraw, G., & Dennison, R. S. (1994). Assessing metacognitive awareness. Contemporary Educational Psychology. doi:10.1006/ceps.1994.1033
- Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science. doi:10.1023/A:1003044231033
An honest note The items here are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the ideas behind Schraw and Dennison's Metacognitive Awareness Inventory - your scores are not comparable to published norms. A real limitation worth knowing: this is a self-report measure, and some researchers question whether rating your own awareness matches how well you actually perform on tasks that require it, since people are not always accurate judges of their own thinking.