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In school, students who believe their abilities are flexible and are attributed to effort will most likely have metacognitive knowledge.  Thus, the students will be aware of their knowledge and the various strategies that will help towards accomplishing different tasks (Pintrich, 2002).    However, for students who lack self-efficacy for believing that they are capable of regulating, planning, and monitoring their cognition and learning.  Pintrich notes a type of metacognition, he says, “Strategic knowledge is knowledge of general strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving” (Pintrich, 2002, p. 220).  Dweck (1999) explains, “Many of the students with performance goals showed a clear helpless pattern in response to difficulty.  A number of them condemned their ability, and their problem-solving deteriorated” (Dweck, p. 16). 

According to achievement goal orientation theory (Dweck 1999) and attribution theory (Weiner 2010), the students who are performance goal oriented may only attribute their failures and success to outside forces, such as, luck and teachers’ instructional methods.  Usually, students develop performance goal oriented through several past academic failure experiences.  According to some researchers, these negative experiences can significantly cause a lack of self-regulatory learning strategies because the students may think that their cognitive ability is not malleable, which can cause a lack of academic self-efficacy.  Thus, if a student has always performed badly on essay form exams, he or she may believe that using techniques to improve at that particular task is a waste of time and effort.  In addition, under the expectation-value theory (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), students may not put a significant amount of effort (i.e., rehearsal, elaboration, and organizational strategies) into studying for a difficult exam because they want to avoid disappointment if they fail after trying so hard to succeed.

Sometimes our awareness of our cognition can be misleading to us.  Pintrich mentions about researchers believe that students can develop the use of metacognition, “Regardless of their theoretical perspective, researchers agree that with development students become more aware of their own thinking as well as more knowledgeable about cognition in general” (Pintrich, 2002, p. 219).  Even with development, our awareness of our strengths and weaknesses are not always accurate.  For example, some people who are in college may have for so long believed that they are innately bad at math, when in fact they can use strategies to improve their math skills.  Thus, in order to have metacognition, you have to believe that knowledge is flexible when there is an appropriate use of strategies for a certain task.  How can students who believe that their abilities on certain tasks are fixed be taught to possess and apply metacognition?

References

Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. [Chapter 3, pp. 15-19]

Weiner, B. (2010). The development of an attribution-based theory of motivation: A history of ideas. Educational Psychologist, 45, 38-36

Wigfield, A., & Eccles, J. S. (2000). Expectancy-value theory of motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 68-81.