Social metacognition in groups: Benefits, difficulties, learning and teaching

Whereas individual metacognition is monitoring and controlling one's own knowledge, emotions, and actions, social metacognition consists of group members' monitoring and control of one another's knowledge, emotions, and actions. Social metacognition distributes metacognitive responsibilities across group members, makes metacognition visible to facilitate learning, and improves individual cognitive processes. By doing so, it aids group members' identification of errors, construction of shared knowledge, and maintenance of group members' motivations. Social metacognition mitigates the challenges of inadequate metacognitive resources, inaccurate selfevaluations, misallocation of cognitive resources, unsuitable choice of solution strategy, or misuse of feedback. However, social metacognition can suffer from status effects, communication challenges, emotional conflicts, and cultural differences. Teachers can help students learn metacognitive skills by creating supportive learning environments or through metacognition lessons. Teaching of metacognitive skills is hindered by metacognition's extra cognitive demands, its application difficulties, its covert nature, and inadequate teacher preparation. Nevertheless, many programs have successfully taught metacognitive skills to students, showing that improving students' social metacognition skills helps them learn more and perform better. Copyright © 2009 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.