- Metacognitive knowledge
- What we know about cognition in general and our own cognitive processes in particular. Flavell divided it into three types: person knowledge (knowing about one's own abilities and limitations relative to others), task knowledge (knowing that some tasks are harder than others and why), and strategy knowledge (knowing which cognitive strategies are effective for which purposes and when to use them).
- Metacognitive regulation
- The active monitoring and control of one's cognitive processes during learning or problem-solving. Includes planning (selecting strategies and setting goals before a task), monitoring (checking comprehension during a task and noticing when it breaks down), and evaluation (assessing performance and the effectiveness of strategies after a task). Metacognitive regulation is what separates strategic, adaptive learners from passive ones.
- Calibration
- The accuracy with which a learner's confidence in their knowledge matches their actual knowledge. A well-calibrated learner knows what they know and knows what they don't — they are confident where their knowledge is solid and uncertain where it is weak. Poor calibration (most often overconfidence) leads learners to stop studying too early, fail to seek help when needed, and misallocate study time.
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- The finding by David Dunning and Justin Kruger (1999) that people with limited competence in a domain tend to greatly overestimate their performance and ability, while failing to recognise their incompetence. The paradox: the skills needed to recognise good performance are the same skills needed to produce it. More advanced learners, by contrast, often underestimate their performance — being aware of how much they don't know.
- Retrieval practice (the testing effect)
- The finding that attempting to recall information from memory — through testing, quizzing, or free recall — strengthens long-term retention far more effectively than re-reading or re-studying the same material. Retrieval practice also improves metacognitive calibration: the experience of failing to recall something signals clearly that learning is incomplete, whereas re-reading material that 'feels familiar' creates a false sense of knowing.
- Spaced repetition
- The practice of distributing study sessions over time, with increasing intervals between reviews. Massed practice (cramming) produces rapid initial learning but rapid forgetting; spaced practice produces slower initial acquisition but far more durable retention. The forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus, 1885) showed that forgetting is steepest immediately after learning and flattens with time — spaced repetition exploits this by reviewing material just as it is about to be forgotten.
- Fluency illusion
- The mistaken sense of understanding that arises from processing fluency — the ease with which information is processed. When we re-read familiar material, it feels easy to process; we interpret this ease as understanding. But fluency reflects familiarity, not genuine comprehension or retrievable memory. The fluency illusion is a key reason why re-reading is an ineffective study strategy despite feeling productive.
- Interleaving
- A practice strategy that involves mixing different types of problems or topics within a single study session, rather than completing all problems of one type before moving to the next (blocking). Interleaving produces slower initial learning (it feels harder) but superior long-term retention and transfer — because it forces the learner to discriminate between problem types and retrieve the appropriate strategy for each.