Teaching metacognitive strategies aims to improve students’ awareness of their thinking processes. This involves helping students to understand how they think, learn, and approach problem-solving. By developing metacognitive skills, learners become more adept at monitoring their own comprehension and recognizing when they do not understand something, which is crucial for self-regulated learning.
This awareness empowers students to make strategic decisions about how to approach learning tasks, effectively setting goals, selecting appropriate strategies, and evaluating their understanding and progress. For instance, they might learn to ask themselves questions like, "Do I understand this concept?" or "What strategy can I use to figure this out?"
Other choices do not align with the primary purpose of metacognitive strategies. Memorizing information does not promote understanding or the ability to apply knowledge; forgetting thinking processes goes against the intention of fostering awareness and reflection; promoting group learning only does not capture the individual cognitive benefits that metacognitive strategies provide to students.