Metacognition in the Classroom: Plan, Monitor, Evaluate

Two pupils get the same question wrong. One shrugs and moves on. The other goes back, rereads the question, spots that they misread a number, and changes their method next time. The second pupil is using metacognition: thinking about their own thinking and adjusting what they do.

Pupils can learn to do this, and teachers can teach it.

What the EEF guidance says

In 2018 the Education Endowment Foundation published “Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning”, a guidance report by Alex Quigley, Daniel Muijs and Eleanor Stringer. A second edition was published in November 2025, so check the EEF website for the current version.

The 2018 report makes seven recommendations:

1. Teachers should acquire the professional understanding and skills to develop their pupils’ metacognitive knowledge.
2. Teach pupils metacognitive strategies, including how to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning.
3. Model your own thinking to help pupils develop their metacognitive and cognitive skills.
4. Set an appropriate level of challenge to develop pupils’ self-regulation and metacognition.
5. Promote and develop metacognitive talk in the classroom.
6. Teach pupils how to organise and effectively manage their learning independently.
7. Schools should support teachers to develop knowledge of these approaches and expect them to be applied appropriately.

The report also stresses that metacognitive strategies work best when taught alongside subject content. Generic study tips are hard for pupils to transfer to a specific task. “Planning” an essay in history looks different from planning a program in computing.

Plan, monitor, evaluate

The report describes metacognition through three stages that pupils move through when they tackle a task.

Plan

Before starting, the pupil thinks about the goal and how to reach it:

• What am I being asked to do?
• Have I done something like this before?
• Which strategy should I use?
• What will a good answer look like?

Monitor

During the task, the pupil checks how it is going:

• Is this strategy working?
• Do I understand what I have just written?
• Am I still answering the question?
• Should I try something different?

Evaluate

After the task, the pupil looks back:

• How well did that go?
• What would I do differently next time?
• Which strategy worked, and why?

These questions look simple. Many pupils will not ask them on their own, especially when a task feels hard. Asking them takes practice, and practice needs prompting.

Modelling: thinking aloud

The most direct way to show pupils what metacognition looks like is to let them hear it. When you solve a problem in front of the class, say what is going on in your head, including the doubts and corrections.

A computing example. You are writing a short program in front of the class that asks for a password and checks it.

“OK, first I need to be clear what this program has to do. It asks the user for a password, then tells them if it’s right. So I’ll need an input, and then some kind of decision. That’s an if statement. Before I type anything, let me think about what the password should be stored as. A string, I think.

[Types code, runs it.]

Hmm. It says ‘Wrong password’ even though I typed the right one. Let me check. Ah, I typed a capital letter in the code but lower case when I ran it. So I need to decide: should the check care about capitals? For a password, yes, so my program is right and I tested it wrongly. Good to know. Next time I’ll write down my test inputs first.”

That short passage models planning (breaking down the task), monitoring (noticing an unexpected result) and evaluating (deciding what to do differently next time). It also shows that experts make mistakes and fix them, which matters for pupils who think getting it wrong means they are bad at the subject.

Tips for thinking aloud

• Plan what you will say. Spontaneous modelling often skips the very steps novices need.
• Include a deliberate error now and then, and show how you catch it.
• Keep it short. Two or three minutes of focused modelling is better than ten of rambling.
• Afterwards, ask pupils what they noticed about how you worked, not just what the answer was.

From modelling to independence

Modelling is the start. Pupils then need guided practice before they can use a strategy alone.

One way to structure this:

1. Model the strategy with think-aloud.
2. Work through a second example together, with pupils suggesting the next step and explaining why.
3. Give pupils a similar task with prompt cards showing the plan, monitor and evaluate questions.
4. Gradually remove the prompts.
5. At the end, ask pupils to reflect in writing: what did you do when you got stuck?

The EEF report includes a seven-step model for explicitly teaching metacognitive strategies that follows a similar path, from activating prior knowledge through modelling and guided practice to independent practice and structured reflection.

Getting the challenge right

The fourth recommendation is easy to overlook. If a task is too easy, pupils have no reason to plan or monitor, because they can do it automatically. If it is far too hard, they have no spare capacity to think about their thinking. Aim for tasks that make pupils pause without overwhelming them.

Metacognitive talk

Classroom talk can make thinking visible. Some prompts to use with the whole class or in pairs:

• “How did you decide where to start?”
• “What did you do when you got stuck?”
• “How do you know your answer is right?”
• “What would you tell someone who is about to try this?”

Pupils who struggle to write about their thinking may find it easier to talk about it first. This can help pupils with literacy difficulties or English as an additional language take part fully.

For pupils with SEND

Metacognitive approaches can support many pupils with SEND, but they may need more scaffolding and more time. Visual prompts on the desk, checklists broken into small steps, and consistent language across lessons all help. Talk to the SENCO about which strategies fit a particular pupil’s needs.

Further reading

• Quigley, A., Muijs, D. and Stringer, E. (2018). Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning: Guidance Report. Education Endowment Foundation.
• Education Endowment Foundation (2025). Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning: Guidance Report, second edition.