Metacognitive Education: Going Beyond Critical Thinking by Joe Y.F. Lau

• Critical thinking necessarily involves a certain amount of "meta-cognition", or "thinking about thinking".
• Critical thinking must involve some amount of meta-cognition, since a critical thinker ought to be able to reflect upon the reason for her beliefs, and take careful steps to ensure that her reasoning is correct.
• One of the most basic reasons for teaching critical thinking is to help students improve their decisions about what to believe or what to do.
• Meta-cognitive education can help students learn how to acquire new skills and expertise quickly and effectively.
• Without creativity, critical thinking is impotent in changing the world. But creativity in turn requires critical thinking in testing and implementing ideas.
• A key insight of the meta-cognitive approach is that being a good thinking is not simply a matter of knowing the principles of correct reasoning. It has to be supported by an appropriate system of knowledge, skills, and character traits.
• Reflective thinking is the precursor to what we now call critical thinking, and it includes a fair amount of logic.
• Higher-order monitoring is needed to correct and fine-tune our cognitive dispositions, and this is precisely a central function of meta-cognition.
• Reasoning itself is a cognitive process.
• We often over-estimate our abilities and underestimate our susceptibility to biases.
• Accurate self-understanding is important for knowing our strengths and weaknesses, and for identifying areas of improvement.
• Creativity is often thought to be a matter of innate talent or a product of mysterious inspiration, But many people fail to realize that creativity in a given domain depends a lot on extensive knowledge and the development of expertise over a long period of time.
• Our meta-conceptions about learning can directly affect our actual learning and problem solving skills.
• Students can improve their academic performance when they are taught that intellectual skills can be acquired and enhanced through effort and in overcoming challenges.
• Exploiting the help of social networks and learning from the best people around us can boost our problem solving ability.
• Conformity and group-think are examples of thinking traps that we should avoid.
• It is worth nothing that cognitive biases can occur even when no logical fallacy is being committed.
• Cognitive biases provide an important source of information about the architecture of the mind.
• Accurate self-knowledge is essential in order to control and improve our thinking.
• Self-regulation is surely crucial for critical thinking. A critical thinker understands the importance of clarity and truth, and takes careful steps to achieve those objectives. Deliberate effort is needed to analyze ideas systematically and to avoid rash judgments.
• In many cases, daily practice for a whole decade is necessary to achieve world-class performance.
• Grit presupposes self regulation, and is highly correlated with conscientiousness (but not IQ). Grit predicts educational attainment, undergraduate grade point average, retention in college, over and above IQ and conscientiousness.
• In any case, meta-cognition ought to be given a more prominent place in the teaching of critical thinking itself.