Metacognitive Knowledge, Skills, and Awareness: A Possible Solution to Enhancing Academic Achievement in African American Adolescents

Abstract

The resegregation of public schools in the United States continues to place African American students at an academic disadvantage with—oftentimes—limited educational resources and fewer qualified teachers. Providing African American students with skills and strategies to succeed has never been more urgent. Metacognition, often defined simply as “thinking about thinking,” is a construct and process that may explain how students can improve and control their thinking and learning. Given the educational inequality African American students often face, providing strategies—with which they have control—may help empower students to better navigate and make the best of their daily academic experiences and environment composed of limited physical and human resources. Toward this end, recent research on metacognition looks promising and may be one viable option to enhance academic achievement among students. In this article, we consider three related areas that inform African American youth educational experiences: (a) the history of the educational context which African American youth have long faced, (b) the laws that have historically and currently buttress and inform the educational landscape for African American youth, and (c) one potential solution (i.e., metacognitive knowledge, skills, and awareness) to reduce or ameliorate some of the problems outlined in the history and laws that have been implicated in the low levels of academic achievement among some African American youth. Following the review of these related literature bases, we offer recommendations on how the extant literature bases may inform directions for future research that is focused on metacognition and that is ethically and culturally responsive.

Reading Literacy and Metacognitive Strategy for Predicting Academic Achievement

“…The application of metacognitive strategy has a positive impact on students' being more selfconfident with their autonomous learning (Sedhu, Ali, & Harun, 2017). Research findings show that many teenager students are not equipped with internal resources and knowledge to involve in metacognitive processes (Smith et al, 2017).…”

“…Pecorari et al (2012) found that there is a strong relationship bet ween reading and academic achie vement. Smith, Black,& Hooper (2017) state that metacognitive strategy with the self-regulation technique may form an effective basis for students to achieve academic successes.…”

“College Material” Structural Care at a New York City Transfer School

“…The literature on marginalized student populations and retention demonstrates that dropout rates are highest among black and Latino/a students with low socioeconomic status [19][20][21][22][23][24]. This persistent inequality is due to unequal distributions of resources across schools with disparate race and class compositions [25][26][27].…”

The Metacognition of Pre-Service Biology Teachers: Awareness, Skills, Understanding, and Practices

“…The existence of this factor was developed since the era of Socrates [1] and introduced by Flavell decades ago [3]. Furthermore, the urgency of metacognition in teaching and learning process highly emphasizes in the recent years [4]. It is clearly indicated by the increase of metacognition studies in some journals of education [5]- [8].…”