Flavell

were not: They usually failed to recall some of the items. It seems that the preschoolers could not monitor and evaluate their current memory capabilities as accurately as the older children could. Monitoring and evaluating one's current memory capabilities is an example of metacognition, and this study is only one of many showing marked developmental advances in metacognitive skills duringmid-dle childhood and adolescence.
What is metacognition? It has usually been broadly and rather loosely defined as any knowledge or cognitive activity that takes as its object, or regulates, any aspect of any cognitive enterprise (e.g., Flavell, 1981 a). It is called metacogni-tion because its core meaning is "cognition about cognition." Metacognitive skills are believed to play an important role inmany types of cognitive activity, includ-ing oral communication of information, oral persuasion, oral comprehension, read-ing comprehension, writing, language acquisition, perception, attention, memory, problem solving, logical reasoning, social cognition, and various forms of self-instruction and self-control. Because of its broad applicability, the concept is rein-troduced several times insubsequent chapters; for example, metamemory in Chap-ter 6 and metacommunication in Chapter 7. Also, the idea that knowledge and cognition can take cognitive as well as noncognitive objects appears in our discus-sion of theory of mind (Chapter 3) and social cognition (Chapter 5). Metacognition is closely related to children's theory of mind in that both examine concepts about thinking. However,research on theory of mind focuses more on younger children, on everyday activities often social-emotional in nature rather than "cold cognition" and academic tasks (P. L. Harris, 1990), and on the general nature of the mind, especially understanding sources of knowledge and the nature of representations. It also could be argued that Piagetian formal-operational thinking is metacognitive in naturebecause it involves thinking about propositions, hypotheses, and imagined possibilities-cognitive objects all. The "sense of the game" described in the next section is also clearly a form of metacognition; it is given a section of its own only because we want to highlight it. Metacognition or related concepts (e.g., executive processes) have also seen service in the fields of cognitive psychology,intelli-gence, artificial intelligence, human abilities, social-learning theory, cognitive oehavior modification, personality development, gerontology, and education. For example, metacomponents, a close cousin of metacognition, playa central role in Sternberg's (1985) theory of intelligence.
Different theorists have conceptualized and classified the domain of metacog-rition in somewhat differentways. Following are some of the sources thai contain rseful discussions of the concept: Borkowski & Turner, 1990; A. L. Brown et aI., 1983; Chi, 1987; Flavell, 1981a, 1981b, 1987; Forrest-Pressley, MacKinnon, & Waller, 1985; Kluwe, 1987; Kurtz, 1990; Weinert & Kluwe, 1987; Wellman, 1985b; md Yussen, 1985. As we see it, most of what is considered metacognition refers to netacognitive knowledge andmelacOl{lIitive monitoring and .I'e.
METACOGNITlVE KNOWLEDGE. This refers to the segment of your required world knowledge that has to do with cognitive matters. It is the knowl-.dge and beliefs you have accumulated through experience and stored in long-term nemory that concern not politics or football or electronics or needlepoint or some nher domain, but the human mind and its doings.Metacognitive knowledge can be oughly subdivided into knowledge about persons, tasks, and strategies.
The person category inclUdes any knowledge and beliefs you might acquire :oncerning what human beings are like as cognitive processors. It Can be further
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Chapter Four


and co-workers (1989) asked 8- and IO-year-olds and undergraduates to rate the similarity of how the mind is used in various...