Monday, January 7, 2008

Improve Your Work Performance

Importance of Metacognition for life success

Metacognition has applications for many arenas of school success. The essence of metacognition is awareness of one's cognitive processes, as well as an ability to develop a plan for achieving a goal and evaluating one's effectiveness of reaching that goal.

In science or mathematics, metacognition looks like planning strategies to use on a word problem or to design an experiment to isolate a given element. Additionally, metacognition means being able to evaluate several different strategies used in order to determine which ones worked, and which ones might be the best to use in a similar situation in the future.

Metacognition is quite possibly one of the most valuable life skills as well as academic skills. Ideally, a new employee may have to be corrected on a procedure once or twice, but after that the boss will hope that s/he will have the awareness to catch and correct that mistake independently. An employee with weak metacognition must continually be corrected externally, which is a source of frustration for employer and employee alike! On a more personal note, most people know someone (or are someone!) who continues to make the same mistake over and over again in his or her personal life, be it in the area of romance, family relationships, or job choice.

This person continually makes the same sort of bad choice, each time thinking "This time will be different". In fact, we often say of such a person "will they never learn?" Such a person has weak metacognition, and may indeed have some other circumstance (personal insecurity, uncontrolled anger, etc.) which prevents metacognition from occurring in that particular area of his or her life. Read more about Metaconition:
http://www.carillongroup.com.au/resources/metaconition.html