The metacognition cycle: plan, monitor, evaluate

Thinking about how you are working

Metacognition is the unglamorous name for a simple habit: paying attention to how you are doing a task, not only to the task. The course teaches it as a three-step cycle — plan, monitor, evaluate — and expects you to be able to run it on any piece of work and say what each step produced. (Some study-skills texts describe four phases; the course uses three. When asked, answer with three.)

Each step has a distinct output, and the outputs are what separate the cycle from vague good intentions:

• Plan — before the task. Output: a written approach — how long, in what order, and which rubric lines the piece must hit.
• Monitor — during the task. Output: a mid-task check against the plan, and a correction if the work has drifted.
• Evaluate — after the task, ideally after the mark. Output: a concrete change to the next plan. Not a diary entry, not a grade, not a summary of what you did — a change.

The third step is the one that makes the cycle a cycle. Evaluation that ends in "that went okay" writes nothing into the next plan, so the next attempt repeats the same misses.

Worked example — a practice memo, all three steps

Plan (Sunday, before drafting). "Ninety minutes on Tuesday evening. Read the case once, fill the stage-4 template, then write. Rubric lines I must hit (the memo rubric's — taught in full in later modules; for now they are simply the marker's list): the recommendation in sentence one after the purpose line; analysis organised by the three criteria; next steps with owners and dates." That is a plan because it names time, sequence and the lines the marker will look for.

Monitor (Tuesday, forty minutes in). You stop and read what exists against the plan. The purpose line is there; the recommendation is not — you have written two paragraphs of background and the recommendation is still in your head. The monitor step catches it now, while there is time: you move a one-sentence recommendation to the top and carry on. Without the monitor step, this is the miss the TA would have found.

Evaluate (the following week, mark in hand). The memo lost marks on two lines: next steps had no dates, and one criterion was named but never applied to alternative B. The evaluation's output is not "I lost marks on two lines"; it is the change: next plan adds a five-minute pass, before submitting, that reads every rubric line aloud and points at the sentence that satisfies it. That change goes into the next plan verbatim.

Applying it to a group meeting

The cycle is not only for writing. Plan a meeting: one decision per agenda item, thirty minutes, one person timing. Monitor it: at the fifteen-minute mark, has the first decision been made? If not, the group is discussing rather than deciding — the monitor step says so out loud. Evaluate it afterwards: what will the next agenda do differently? A common output is "put the decision to be made in the agenda line itself, not just the topic."

The step most often skipped

Of the three, monitor is the one learners drop. Planning feels productive and evaluating is forced on you by the mark; monitoring means interrupting yourself mid-task, and the work always feels like it is going fine from the inside. Build a trigger for it — a timer at the halfway point, or a rule that you read the plan before every break — because the corrections it produces are the cheap ones.