Metacognition: New insights into old problems?

Abstract

necessarily one which it is inappropriate to study, nor to suggest that current work is wrong-headed, but simply to echo the view that he who ignores history will be doomed to relive it. In 'Children's Thinking - What Develops?' a central theme of the work' was that young children lacked, not so much basic cognitive skills, but metacognitive skills. Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning in the study of various aspects of this topic. Yet it is still to many an unfamiliar term. It is therefore pertinent to attempt a definition before proceeding further. An accepted means of pursuing this end is to seek etymological evidence, in this case of the prefix 'meta'. Here lies the first complexity, for it is apparent that there is no consensus of what it denotes. It is one of the few 'facts' precious to those of us with little pretension to philosophical expertise that Aristotelian metaphysics was originally merely a compiler's note that the essays which were concerned with 'the nature of being' followed those concerned with aspects of the physical world. From this mundane beginning the term 'metaphysics' was adopted to denote studies which were concerned with issues 'beyond' or 'of greater abstraction than' those of the physical world. Thomas, in a paper2 pleading for moderation in the