On Metacognition, or Thinking About Thinking

Do you say, “I better write this one down, or it will disappear from my brain?” Do you count on answers to questions "coming to you" hours after the question arises, or your fingers "learning" a phone number as soon as you've dialed it five times? If you do, that's great. You're engaging in a process called metacognition. (You can read about the word meta and the evolution of the word metacognition in education research here.)

Metacognition means ‘thinking about thinking,’ and educators going back to Piaget believe it helps us learn. Case in point: At the Blue School, an experimental elementary school in New York City, students are asked to draw pictures to show the relationship of their emotions to their ability to learn. Their teachers believe that when students understand how anger and sadness slow down the brain's capacity, those student will take the time to calm themselves before they try to grapple with a lesson. (Read more about this here.) The metacognitive approach is backed by education research showing that metacognitive ability is as important to learning as “natural” intelligence.

Recently, brain scientists have started to come to the same conclusion. Using magnetic resonance imaging, they have been able to locate the part of the brain that thinks about thinking and determine that it is larger in people who are more accurate in their assessments of their own thoughts. Interestingly, this area of the brain is unique to human beings, leading to the suggestion that our ability to self-reflect — to know ourselves — is what separates us as a species. Read more about this here.

And then make use of your uniquely-human ability to self-reflect or metacognize as you play the Challenge. You can start with reading the Vocabulary.com Blog. In the section you're reading now, Under the Hood, we describe how the Challenge mimics the way your brain learns vocabulary on its own. Invest the time to synthesize that information with your own self-knowledge, and you’ll be a faster, smarter, more strategic learner for it.

Here are some great places to start:
Can You Ever Fully Know a Word? On word knowledge vertigo 
The Forgetting Curve: How does the brain decide what to remember? 
Can Forgetting Help You Learn? Here's hope for when your brain feels like a sieve 
Do I Know You? On Word Knowledge Limbo 
Vocabulary Begets Vocabulary: The More You Know, the More You Learn