Use of learning strategies and tactics reflects:

Concept: Metacognition means cognition about cognition — thinking directed at one’s own thinking. In Flavell’s (1979) framework its knowledge component, metacognitive knowledge, is what a learner has stored about cognition, and it runs along three strands: person knowledge (what I am like as a learner), task knowledge (what this task demands), and strategy knowledge (which procedure serves which purpose, and when it is worth using).

Application: A learning strategy is a plan adopted to reach a learning goal (elaborating, organising, summarising, distributing practice); a tactic is the specific move that carries the plan out (drawing a concept map, building a mnemonic, self-testing on a chapter). Selecting among these, judging whether the choice is working, and switching when it is not, draws on what the learner knows about the task’s demands, about themselves as a learner, and about what each strategy is good for — that is, on the strategy-knowledge strand of metacognitive knowledge. The strategic and tactical choices a learner makes are therefore the visible expression of that underlying knowledge.

How the alternatives differ:

• Intellectual humility is a disposition about the limits of one’s own knowledge — an attitude towards one’s own beliefs, and it prescribes no procedure for tackling a task.

• Overlearning is a schedule of practice continued past first mastery — it fixes how much rehearsal is done, not what the learner knows about which method to pick.

• Rote learning is a method of study — repetition of surface form without integration with meaning. It names how material is practised (rehearsal can itself be deliberately chosen), not knowledge about how one’s own cognition works.

Result: Deploying learning strategies and tactics reflects meta cognitive knowledge.