Metacognition across Primary Subjects
- primarytechreview
- Nov 8
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 9
Metacognition is often defined as 'thinking about our thinking'. Children can to be taught to apply this metacognitive thinking to the activities they do, both in education and in their everyday lives. Metacognition is referred to through the computational thinking requirements in computing, but is an important part of subjects across the primary curriculum.
The importance of metacognition
The Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) states,
'pupils who are metacognitive demonstrate independence and resilience throughout the learning process.'
Children who are taught metacognitive strategies are more likely to succeed as they adopt logical approaches to solving problems. They are able to recognise the resources around them, and become more aware of their own knowledge and barriers to success. In this way, they become more active participants in the learning process. The Socratic maxim, 'know thyself', ('gnothi seauton'), refers to the value of knowing one's own thinking.
A common metacognitive process
I am interested to explore commonalities in metacognition between subjects. While subjects have unique challenges, the more we can help children connect thinking process between subjects together, the more likely they are to use metacognition successfully.
These are some child-friendly principles that have application across subjects:
Reading the instructions carefully
Looking at the tools available to me
Deciding what success looks like, including looking at examples
Thinking about patterns
Remembering where I have done this before
Pausing
Breaking the problem down into solvable chunks
Thinking about things I get stuck with and ways to overcome these barriers
Being considerate of others and the environment I am in
Persevering when something is difficult
Implementing and testing a solution
It is difficult to produce a list that covers all aspects of thinking, but a concise list such as that above is a useful, cross-curricular way of prompting primary metacognition.
Where metacognitive strategies can be agreed upon within establishments, they can be referred to frequently in lessons by students and teachers.
English
Reading activities in English have particular focuses that children can be taught to recognise. When I started teaching, I learned these as the 'AF' (assessment focuses). Children became competent at understanding what type of questions was being asked, enabling them to draw upon their previous experience of answering similar questions and to identify patterns when answering questions well, such as giving two pieces of evidence from a text. Giving children strategies to answer different types of reading comprehension questions taught them to produce insightful, confident and informed responses to texts.
Writing is one of the most difficult activities for many children at school. Writing can involve so many aspects, including fine-motor skills, spelling, recall, creativity, knowledge of context, grammar and concentration.
Primary English teachers often support children with their writing by reducing their cognitive load across these areas. Children are given opportunities to freely discuss creative ideas, so that these are ready when they begin the writing process. Children can be provided with vocabulary, writing scaffolds and common sentence structures, such as those provided by writer and educational consultant, Alan Peat. This helps them to spot patterns in writing and use structures that they have used in previous tasks. Children also become aware that they have a toolkit of sentences structures to draw upon, decreasing their cognitive load and giving them confidence as writers.
Children can also use the language of metacognition when they are writing. Teachers encourage children to break story writing down according to the 'story mountain' of opening, build up, problem, resolution and ending. Children can then focus on one aspect at a time. They can think about patterns within sections of writing, such as patterns of description, dialogue and persuasive writing. They might identify barriers to their writing and recognise when they encounter these, knowing where to go for additional ideas and inspiration. Children using talk for writing, perhaps using the iPad voice recorder app to rehearse sentences, are implementing and testing solutions to the writing problem.
Maths
Maths is best though of as a language. Like a language, maths requires repetition of concepts until they become familiar and fluent. These concepts can then be applied to solving problems, just as vocabulary is used in communication.
Because of the repetition that is needed to learn something, children need perseverance and effort within Maths lessons. They need to be taught to recognise when they are expending this, what to do if they are not making progress and when to recognise their success. They also need to be taught to recognise the value of repetition, being the only way to learn new skills and ideas.
Children should be taught to recognise the tools they have available to them when solving maths problems. These tools can include them using physical resources to help them, as well as drawing diagrams and using taught methods. This also includes them reading questions carefully and identifying the language and amounts that are important for solving the problem.
Recognising where they have solved similar problems is an important part of children's success in maths. In computational thinking, this is known as 'generalisation'. Children need to be taught to make connections between repeated addition, multiplication and division. They need to be taught to associate their experience of measurement with conversion questions, and to link this to multiplication and division. They should be taught that formal division methods like short division are really just shortened ways of asking how many times a number goes into another number.
Computing
Metacognition is crucial to computing, as made clear in the opening part of the National Curriculum for primary computing, stating,
'A high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world.'
Computational thinking is a form of metacognition that is particularly well-suited for computing. Computational thinking involves,
Decomposing a problem
Pattern spotting
Abstraction (ruling out unnecessary information)
Algorithm design
Debugging
Generalisation is sometimes included as a step in computational thinking.
While these terms are commonly used for computing problems, they have clear parallels with some of the cross-curricular strategies described above.
In computing, children need to be taught to identify and use the tools they have to solve a problem. These tools can be physical tools, including motors, sensors and electronics equipment, blocks of code or types commands.
Children need to be able to identify patterns and sequences that are needed to solve a problem. Once patterns are identified, shorter more efficient code can be written using repeat loops.
Children should be taught to recognise where they have solved similar problems before. Whenever they are programming a game using Scratch, children will need to make sprite move around the screen using code like 'forever, if pressed, change x or y by 10'. They should not have to think of the solution to this problem if they have used this code in a previous task.
Children will also need a significant amount of resilience when solving coding problems. They will need to be taught the importance of this, as well as strategies to use when they cannot solve a coding problem. (I have been stuck on coding problems for hours, for the solution to come after a period of rest and other activity)
The BEBRAS competition is a yearly event run by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It is a perfect opportunity to focus on metacognition with children, thinking about where to start solving problems, ruling out information, process of elimination and other strategies.
Conclusions
It is clear that there are crossovers between subjects in terms of the thinking processes required. Even in practical subjects like PE, children can be taught to look for patterns, break movements down, look for support when needed and use resilience.
Metacognition, like growth mindset, is becoming much more prominent in primary schools, supported by organisations like the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF).
For metacognition to become established universally in schools without adding to an already significant teaching workload, it needs to become embedded in subjects through common language, also recognising the subjects specific challenges that exist. This embedded approach, along with opportunities for explicit practising of thinking skills, will give children the independence and confidence they need to tackle challenges across the curriculum effectively.
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