“My child is on the honor roll” is a commonly sighted bumper sticker as one drives through their local community. A coveted parental privilege is to offhandedly mention their child’s status as a “straight A student.” How then is this top prize determined? Grades. Proficiency in a subject is summed up by a letter grade on a report card. It is assumed that an A is great, a B is ok, a C is not so great, and a D or F is sometimes punishable. Some parents may go as far as extrinsically rewarding “good grades” through cash or other tangible rewards. A grade sometimes seems like the ultimate goal rather than understanding and proficiency. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and other great thinkers such as Shakespeare, Galileo, and Plato were arguably some of the most well-educated people of their time. One thing differentiated their education from that of students today; none…show more content… It is most often associated with John Flavell, 1979. According to Flavell, metacognition is acquired knowledge about cognitive processes and knowledge used to control those processes. Deciding how to approach a learning task, how to modify such approaches, and how to determine when the task is completed are all examples of metacognitive work. According to Flavell, metacognition can be divided into three categories: knowledge of person variables, task variables, and strategy variables. Person variables are knowledge regarding how human beings learn and process information and an individual’s knowledge of how they personally learn. Task variables are an understanding needed to indicate the nature of the task and the demands for processing placed upon the individual. Strategy variables are the awareness of specific strategies one could use to maneuver through a learning task and ability to evaluate if the strategies are
