The term "metacognition" refers to a person's cognition about cognition, or a person's knowledge of cognitive processes and states such as memory, attention, knowledge, conjecture, and illusion. The issue is not how the person executes these processes but what they know and believe about these processes. Metacognition has been examined from a number of different perspectives and in order to explain the different types of cognitive processes about which a person may have knowledge.
Wellman (1985) considers the origins of metacognition and finds that an understanding of the origins can be based on one axiom and three supportable propositions. The axiom is definitional and asserts that metacognition consists of a large multifaceted theory of mind. The three propositions are as follows:
1) very young children, 2- and 3-year-olds, grasp the existence of the mental world, the realm of mental states and processes that are marked off from that of physical objects or behavioral acts;
2) children of this age and younger also understand much about the distinction between reality and not reality, and they can easily distinguish, in certain clear cases, real from not-real things, being from seeming; and
3) the development of an understanding of mind and an understanding of reality are intertwined, and a distinction between being and seeming requires some theory of mind which derives from contrasting that category of experience with reality.
Wellman also notes that many exaggerated claims have been made for the importance of metacognitive knowledge, and in general these claims stress the practical utility of knowledge about cognition for the execution of various problem-solving performances, such as knowledge about memory for remembering, of knowledge about language for speaking or reading.
Flavell (1992) offers a model of cognitive monitoring to trace the wide variety of cognitive enterprises occurring through the actions...