Cognitive Strategy

A cognitive strategy is a method a person uses to solve a problem, learn something, remember it, or make a decision. Counting on your fingers to add 3 and 4 is a cognitive strategy. So is retrieving "7" directly from memory, rereading a confusing paragraph, drawing a diagram of a word problem, breaking a big goal into smaller steps, or quizzing yourself with flashcards before an exam. Cognitive strategies include reasoning, planning, calculating, studying, and many other organized ways of using the mind.

The idea matters for at least three reasons. First, psychologists have found that people, including young children, typically have several strategies available for the same task and choose among them, often quite adaptively. Second, how people learn new strategies, and how they come to use better ones, is a central part of how thinking develops. Third, strategies can be taught, and teaching them well is one of the more reliably effective things educators can do, especially for students who struggle.

This article explains what cognitive strategies are, how researchers have studied them, the major frameworks for classifying them, what research shows about teaching them, and the most common misconceptions. It also includes a set of frequently asked questions.

Definition and basic ideas

What counts as a strategy

Definitions vary, but most share a few elements. A cognitive strategy is:

• Goal-directed: it is used to achieve something, such as getting an answer, remembering a fact, or understanding a text.
• Organized: it consists of steps or operations carried out in some order, which may overlap.
• Optional: it is one of several possible ways to do the task. If there is only one way to do something, it makes little sense to call it a strategy.
• Learned: strategies are discovered, taught, or picked up from others, and stored as knowledge that can be called upon later when a similar situation arises.

The Wikipedia article on the topic describes cognitive strategies as the specific methods people use to solve problems or exploit opportunities. It also notes that a strategy need not be purely mental: it typically interacts with what the article calls the "execution context," the environment and tools available. Counting on fingers uses the hands; doing long division uses paper; navigating with a map uses an external representation. Much of human cognition works by offloading part of the work onto the world.

Strategies, skills, and styles

It helps to distinguish strategies from some neighboring ideas.

The difference between a strategy and a skill is partly one of degree. A strategy used consciously at first may, with practice, become automatic and skill-like. The difference between strategies and styles is more fundamental: strategies are chosen to fit a task and can change from moment to moment, while styles describe broader tendencies. The popular claim that teaching should be matched to each student's "learning style" has not held up well in research reviews, which is one reason the distinction matters.

An everyday example: simple addition

The simplest illustration, used in the Wikipedia article and throughout developmental psychology, is adding two small numbers such as 3 + 4. There are several ways to do it.

These strategies differ in how long they take, how much memory and attention they require, and how prone they are to particular errors. Retrieval is fastest but works only if the answer has been stored accurately. Counting all is slow but reliable for small numbers. The min strategy minimizes the number of counts, which is why it is efficient. A key insight of research on strategies is that a single child may use several of these on different problems, or even on the same problem on different days.

History of the concept

Problem solving and heuristics

Interest in the methods people use to think is old, but several twentieth-century works shaped modern research. The mathematician George Pólya's How to Solve It (1945) set out a general approach to mathematical problem solving in four phases: understand the problem, devise a plan, carry out the plan, and look back to check and learn from the solution. Pólya also listed many heuristics, rules of thumb such as "work backwards," "solve a simpler related problem," and "draw a figure." His book was aimed at students and teachers, and it popularized the idea that problem-solving methods can be explicitly described and taught.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, working at what became Carnegie Mellon University, studied human problem solving by asking people to think aloud as they worked on puzzles and logic problems, and by building computer programs that simulated their reasoning. Their General Problem Solver, developed with Cliff Shaw in the late 1950s, used a strategy called means-ends analysis: compare the current state with the goal, find the most important difference, and apply an operation that reduces it, setting up subgoals as needed. Newell and Simon's book Human Problem Solving (1972) treated strategies as programs the mind runs, an idea echoed in the Wikipedia article's description of strategies as something like mental "programs" or "software."

Cognitive strategies in instructional theory

The educational psychologist Robert M. Gagné, in The Conditions of Learning (first edition 1965), proposed that learning produces five main kinds of capability: verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes. In Gagné's scheme, cognitive strategies are the means by which learners manage their own learning, remembering, and thinking: the way they direct their attention, organize what they study, and approach new problems. Because Gagné's framework became influential in instructional design, it helped make "cognitive strategies" a standard term in education.

Metacognition

In 1979 the developmental psychologist John H. Flavell published "Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring" in American Psychologist, introducing the term metacognition for knowledge about and regulation of one's own cognitive processes. Metacognition became tightly linked to strategy research. Using a strategy well requires knowing that it exists, knowing when it is useful, monitoring whether it is working, and switching if it is not. These are metacognitive activities.

Flavell's earlier research had also identified a common pattern in children's strategy use. In a 1966 study by Flavell, David Beach, and Jack Chinsky, young children who did not spontaneously rehearse items they were trying to remember could do so when prompted, and their memory then improved. This pattern was named a production deficiency: the child is capable of using the strategy but does not produce it spontaneously. Later researchers, notably Patricia Miller, described a related pattern called utilization deficiency: a child begins to use a new strategy but gains little or no benefit from it at first, because carrying it out still demands too much effort.

How children choose and develop strategies

Challenging the single-strategy view

For some time, researchers looking at children's arithmetic assumed that children of a given age used one main strategy. A 1972 study by Guy Groen and John Parkman examined how long children took to solve simple addition problems and found that solution times were well predicted by the size of the smaller addend. This fit the min strategy: if children start from the larger number and count up by the smaller, problems with a larger smaller addend take longer. The "min model" became the accepted description of how first and second graders add.

The developmental psychologist Robert S. Siegler challenged this conclusion in work beginning in the 1980s. By combining solution times with children's reports of what they had done on each individual problem, he showed that children used a mix of strategies. The min model fit the average data because averaging hid the variety. In a frequently cited line from his work, Siegler wrote that the min model had been widely accepted for about fifteen years, but that "despite all this support, the min model is wrong" as a description of what individual children do on each problem.

Adaptive strategy choice

Siegler's research showed that children's strategy choices are often adaptive. Children tend to retrieve answers on easy problems where they are confident, and fall back on slower but more reliable strategies such as counting on harder problems where retrieval might produce an error. This allows them to be both fast and accurate on average. A summary of this work notes that the min strategy is used most when the smaller addend is small and the difference between addends is large, as in 9 + 2.

To explain how children make such choices, Siegler and Christopher Shipley proposed a computational model called the Adaptive Strategy Choice Model (ASCM), presented in a 1995 chapter titled "Variation, Selection, and Cognitive Change." The model keeps a record of how fast and accurate each strategy has been, both in general and on particular kinds of problems, and chooses strategies with probabilities that reflect their past success. Over time, more efficient strategies win out, and new strategies, even if initially unreliable, are tried often enough to have a chance to prove themselves.

Overlapping waves

Siegler summarized the developmental pattern with a metaphor he called the overlapping waves model, developed most fully in his book Emerging Minds (1996). At any given time, a child knows several ways of solving a type of problem. With experience, some strategies are used more and more while less efficient ones fade, and new ones appear. Plotted over time, the frequency of each strategy rises and falls like a series of overlapping waves rather than a staircase of distinct stages.

Later studies have tested the model. A microgenetic study of multiplication learning published in 2012 reported that statistical modeling of children's strategy use confirmed the overlapping waves pattern, and a 2018 study of subtraction strategies likewise reported support for it. Critics, including Sébastien Forestier and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, have argued that patterns seen in group averages do not prove that each individual child follows overlapping waves; individual children might switch strategies in more discrete steps.

How new strategies are discovered

In How Children Discover New Strategies (1989), Siegler and Eric Jenkins reported a detailed study of children discovering the min strategy on their own. By observing children over many sessions, they found that discoveries often came after a period of hesitation and that children frequently did not generalize new strategies right away, even after discovering them. They also found that children seldom tried illogical strategies, suggesting that discovery was guided by an understanding of what a legitimate addition strategy must do.

Four aspects of strategic change

Patrick Lemaire and Siegler, in a 1995 study of children learning multiplication published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, proposed that strategic change has four distinct aspects:

The framework is useful because improvement can occur in any of the four, and different interventions target different aspects. Teaching a new strategy expands the repertoire; practice improves execution; feedback can improve selection.

Rational analysis

The psychologist John R. Anderson's The Adaptive Character of Thought (1990) offered a broader rationale for why strategy choice might be adaptive. Anderson's approach, called rational analysis, starts by asking what the mind would do if it were optimally adapted to the statistical structure of its environment, and then checks how well people match that prediction. Applied to strategies, the idea is that people should tend to choose methods that, in their experience, deliver good results at acceptable cost. This connects strategy research to the broader study of bounded rationality, which holds that real decision makers must balance the quality of a decision against the time and effort it requires.

Strategies in decision making

The same theme appears in research on how adults make decisions. In The Adaptive Decision Maker (1993), John Payne, James Bettman, and Eric Johnson argued that people possess a repertoire of decision strategies, ranging from thorough methods that weigh every attribute of every option to simple shortcuts such as choosing the option that is best on the most important attribute. People shift among them depending on the task, trading off accuracy against effort. When time is short or options are numerous, people tend to switch to simpler strategies.

Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues developed a related idea, the "adaptive toolbox": a collection of simple heuristics, each suited to particular environments. On this view, a strategy is not good or bad in itself; it is good or bad for a particular kind of task and environment. This is consistent with what developmental research found in children's arithmetic.

Kinds of cognitive strategies

Researchers have proposed many ways to classify strategies. Two widely used frameworks come from research on learning.

Weinstein and Mayer's learning strategies

In a 1986 chapter in the Handbook of Research on Teaching, Claire Ellen Weinstein and Richard E. Mayer proposed a classification of learning strategies that has been widely adopted.

Rehearsal tends to support short-term retention of individual items; elaboration and organization tend to produce more meaningful and durable learning because they connect new material to what is already known and to other parts of the material.

Cognitive versus metacognitive strategies

Many researchers distinguish cognitive strategies, which operate directly on the material (rehearsing, summarizing, drawing a diagram), from metacognitive strategies, which operate on one's own thinking (planning how to approach a task, monitoring progress, evaluating whether a strategy is working). A student who summarizes each paragraph is using a cognitive strategy. A student who notices that their summaries are vague, realizes they did not understand the chapter, and decides to reread it is using metacognitive strategies.

The good strategy user

Michael Pressley, John Borkowski, and Wolfgang Schneider developed a model of the good strategy user in the late 1980s. In their account, effective thinkers do not merely know many strategies. They also know when and where each one is useful, monitor their own performance, have a broad base of knowledge in the subject at hand, and believe that effort and appropriate strategies lead to success. On this view, strategy knowledge, metacognition, domain knowledge, and motivation all work together.

Teaching cognitive strategies

Why teach strategies at all

A recurring finding is that many learners, especially younger students and students with learning difficulties, do not spontaneously use effective strategies, even when they are capable of using them. This is the production deficiency again. The good news is that explicit teaching can change this.

Reciprocal teaching

One of the best-known examples is reciprocal teaching, developed by Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Ann L. Brown. In a 1984 paper in Cognition and Instruction, they reported two studies with seventh-grade students who could decode words but had poor reading comprehension. Students were taught four strategies:

1. Summarizing: identifying and stating the main ideas of a passage.
2. Questioning: generating questions about the content.
3. Clarifying: noticing and resolving points of confusion.
4. Predicting: anticipating what will come next.

The teacher first modeled the strategies, then teacher and students took turns leading a dialogue about the text, with the teacher gradually handing over responsibility. The reciprocal procedure produced larger and more lasting gains in comprehension than a comparison intervention modeled on typical classroom practice, and the second study replicated many of the findings with volunteer teachers working with their existing reading groups.

A 1994 review of sixteen studies by Barak Rosenshine and Carla Meister found that the effects depended on how comprehension was measured. With standardized tests, the median effect size favoring reciprocal teaching was 0.32. With comprehension tests developed by the experimenters, the median effect size was 0.88. This pattern, larger effects on researcher-designed measures that are closely aligned with what was taught and smaller effects on broad standardized tests, is common in educational research and is worth keeping in mind when reading claims about any teaching method.

Self-Regulated Strategy Development

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), developed by Karen Harris and Steve Graham beginning in the 1980s, is an approach to teaching writing strategies along with the self-regulation skills needed to use them: goal setting, self-monitoring, self-instruction, and self-reinforcement. Instruction proceeds through six stages, which are flexible rather than strictly sequential: develop background knowledge, discuss the strategy, model it, memorize it, support it with gradually reduced help, and move to independent performance.

SRSD has been studied extensively. In a meta-analysis for the 2007 report Writing Next, Steve Graham and Dolores Perin found that, for students in grades 4 to 12, SRSD had an average weighted effect size of 1.14 on writing quality, the largest of the writing interventions examined. A 2012 meta-analysis by Graham, Debra McKeown, Sharlene Kiuhara, and Harris of writing instruction in the elementary grades reported an effect size of 1.02 across 20 studies of strategy instruction, and 1.17 across the 14 studies that used SRSD. A later review applying stricter inclusion criteria to studies of students in grades 6 to 12 found a smaller but still substantial SRSD effect of 0.84. A limitation noted in reviews is that many SRSD studies were conducted by the developers and their colleagues.

Learning and study strategies

In a 1996 meta-analysis in the Review of Educational Research, John Hattie, John Biggs, and Nola Purdie analyzed 51 studies of interventions designed to improve students' learning or study skills. Secondary summaries report that interventions involving metacognitive elements, such as teaching students when and why to use a strategy, tended to produce larger effects than those that taught strategies alone, and that strategy training worked best when it was embedded in the subject matter rather than taught as a separate skill.

Charlotte Dignath and Gerhard Büttner, in a 2008 meta-analysis in Metacognition and Learning, examined interventions designed to foster self-regulated learning among primary and secondary school students. They used meta-analytic regression to identify which training characteristics were associated with larger effects, and found moderate-to-large effects on academic achievement overall.

Which study strategies work best?

In 2013 the psychologists John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan, and Daniel Willingham published a widely cited review, "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques," in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They evaluated ten techniques that students commonly use or could easily use, rating each for its overall usefulness based on how well it generalizes across learners, materials, tasks, and settings.

The finding that attracted the most attention was that two of the techniques students report relying on most heavily, highlighting and rereading, received low utility ratings, while practice testing and distributed practice were rated highly. "Low utility" in this review does not mean useless in every case; it means the evidence did not show consistent benefits across the range of conditions considered. Summarization, for instance, can help students who have been trained to do it well.

Principles from strategy instruction research

Across these lines of research, several practical principles recur:

• Explicit explanation: tell learners what the strategy is, why it helps, and when to use it.
• Modeling: demonstrate the strategy, often by thinking aloud.
• Guided practice with gradual release: support learners while they practice, then reduce support as they become competent.
• Metacognitive instruction: teach learners to monitor whether a strategy is working and to adjust.
• Embedding in content: teach strategies within real subject matter rather than as abstract skills.
• Extended practice: strategies take time to become efficient, and early use may produce little benefit (the utilization deficiency).
• Motivation: help learners attribute success to effort and strategy use rather than to fixed ability.

Strategies across domains

Cognitive strategies are not limited to arithmetic and studying. A few examples from other areas show how general the idea is.

Memory

Some memory strategies are very old. The method of loci, or memory palace, involves imagining a familiar route or building and mentally placing each item to be remembered at a location along it; to recall the items, one mentally walks the route. Classical writers, including Cicero, credited its invention to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, and it was a standard part of training in rhetoric in the ancient and medieval world.

Another basic memory strategy is chunking: grouping individual items into larger meaningful units. A string of digits is easier to remember as a few groups than as many separate digits. Expertise makes chunking far more powerful. In a classic 1973 study, William Chase and Herbert Simon showed chess masters and weaker players positions from real games for a few seconds. Masters reproduced the positions far more accurately, but their advantage largely disappeared when the pieces were placed randomly. The masters' advantage came from recognizing familiar patterns, which let them encode a position as a few meaningful chunks rather than many individual pieces.

Learning from examples: self-explanation

In a 1989 study published in Cognitive Science, Michelene Chi and colleagues examined how university students studied worked examples in physics. Students who learned more tended to explain the examples to themselves as they read, generating reasons for each step and relating it to principles, while less successful students tended to read the examples without such explanations. This "self-explanation effect" has since been studied in many settings, and, as noted above, self-explanation received a moderate utility rating in the 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues.

Retrieval as a strategy

A strategy can be powerful even when it seems like a test rather than a way of learning. In a 2006 study in Psychological Science, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students read prose passages and then either reread them or take recall tests on them. On a test given shortly afterward, rereading did as well or better. On a test given a week later, students who had practiced retrieval remembered more. This "testing effect" is one reason practice testing received a high utility rating: the act of retrieving information strengthens later memory for it.

Problem solving

General problem-solving strategies include working backward from the goal, breaking a problem into subproblems, drawing a diagram, solving a simpler version first, and looking for an analogy with a problem already solved. Pólya listed many such heuristics. Research has shown, however, that knowing general heuristics is often not enough. Experts in a field typically rely on strategies tied to the specific kinds of problems in that field, which they recognize from experience.

Debates and limitations

Research on cognitive strategies has produced robust findings, but several questions remain debated.

Transfer

A long-standing difficulty is transfer: strategies taught in one setting often fail to be used in another. A student taught to summarize history passages may not summarize science passages unprompted. Much of the emphasis on metacognition, on teaching when and why a strategy is useful, comes from efforts to improve transfer. How well strategy instruction transfers, and how to design instruction that transfers better, remain active questions.

Measurement

As the reciprocal teaching reviews illustrate, effect sizes depend heavily on how outcomes are measured. Tests designed by researchers to match what was taught tend to show larger effects than broad standardized tests. Readers comparing effect sizes across studies should keep in mind that they are not always measuring the same thing.

Who conducts the research

Several reviews have noted that many studies of a given method were conducted by its developers. This does not mean the findings are wrong, but independent replication strengthens confidence. Large-scale trials run by independent evaluators sometimes find smaller effects than early developer-led studies.

Averages and individuals

Siegler's work showed that group averages can hide individual variation in strategy use. The same caution applies to research on teaching: a method that helps on average may help some students a great deal and others very little. Critics of the overlapping waves model raise a parallel concern about developmental data.

Strategies versus knowledge

Some researchers emphasize that domain knowledge, rather than general strategies, is the main driver of skilled performance, pointing to studies such as Chase and Simon's work on chess. Others argue that strategies and knowledge develop together and that teaching strategies helps students make better use of what they know. The good strategy user model was proposed partly to integrate these views.

A worked hypothetical

The following example is hypothetical. It illustrates how the ideas above fit together and does not describe a real study.

A ninth-grade student, Maya, is preparing for a biology test on cell structure. At first she rereads her textbook chapter three times the night before the test and highlights important sentences. This feels productive because the text seems increasingly familiar.

Her teacher introduces a different approach. Maya writes questions on index cards ("What does the mitochondrion do?"), quizzes herself, and checks her answers. She studies for twenty minutes on four separate days instead of for an hour and a half on one night. When she gets a card wrong, she writes a short explanation of the correct answer in her own words and connects it to something she already knows, such as comparing the cell membrane to a security checkpoint.

In the terms used above, Maya has expanded her repertoire (adding practice testing and elaboration), changed the distribution of her strategies (less rereading, more self-testing), and begun to improve her selection by noticing which cards she gets wrong and focusing there, a metacognitive move. At first, making cards and quizzing herself takes more time and feels harder than rereading, an example of the effort cost that new strategies often carry before they become efficient.

Strategies and artificial intelligence

The idea of a cognitive strategy has long been entangled with computing. Newell and Simon's simulation of human problem solving treated strategies as programs. Later cognitive architectures, such as Anderson's ACT-R, model how people choose among competing procedures based on their past costs and benefits, and how practice turns slow, deliberate procedures into fast, automatic ones. Siegler and Shipley's Adaptive Strategy Choice Model is another example of a computational model used to test a psychological theory.

In artificial intelligence more broadly, the question of how a system should choose among methods, for example among search algorithms or reasoning procedures, given limited time and computation, is sometimes called metareasoning or algorithm selection. It parallels the human problem of strategy selection: the best method depends on the problem, and choosing well requires learning from experience which methods tend to work where.

Common misconceptions

"Each person has one fixed way of thinking"

Research on strategy choice shows the opposite. Children and adults typically know several strategies for the same task and switch among them depending on the problem. Variability is not a sign of confusion; it is often a sign of adaptive choice and an engine of learning.

"Children go through strict stages of strategy use"

Older stage theories suggested that children move cleanly from one way of thinking to the next. The overlapping waves model suggests that strategies coexist and gradually shift in frequency. While critics debate how well the model describes each individual, the general finding that multiple strategies coexist is well supported.

"If a student can do a strategy, they will use it"

The production deficiency shows that capability does not guarantee use. Learners often need prompting, explanation of why the strategy helps, and practice before they use it spontaneously.

"A new strategy should help immediately"

The utilization deficiency shows that new strategies sometimes bring little benefit at first because they demand effort. Abandoning a strategy too early can mean missing its later benefits.

"The study methods that feel most effective are the most effective"

Rereading and highlighting make material feel familiar, and familiarity can be mistaken for learning. Practice testing and spaced study can feel harder but tend to produce better long-term retention. How fluent studying feels is an unreliable guide to how much is being learned.

"Strategy instruction is about generic thinking skills"

Strategies are usually most effective when taught within the subject in which they will be used and when combined with knowledge of that subject. The good strategy user model emphasizes domain knowledge as an essential component, not an optional one.

"Cognitive strategies and learning styles are the same thing"

Learning styles, in the popular sense, refer to claimed preferences for receiving information through a particular sense. Cognitive strategies are methods chosen to fit tasks. The evidence supporting the teaching of specific strategies is much stronger than the evidence for matching instruction to learning styles.

Frequently asked questions

What is the simplest definition of a cognitive strategy?

It is a method a person uses to carry out a mental task, such as solving a problem, remembering information, or understanding a text, chosen from among other possible methods.

Are cognitive strategies conscious?

Sometimes. A student deliberately making an outline is using a conscious strategy. An adult who retrieves "7" for 3 + 4 may not be aware of choosing anything. Researchers often infer strategies from patterns of solution times and errors, combined with what people report doing immediately after each problem.

How do researchers find out which strategy someone used?

Common methods include timing responses, analyzing errors, observing behavior such as finger counting or lip movements, and asking people immediately after each trial how they solved it. Siegler's research showed the value of combining these trial-by-trial measures rather than relying on averages, because averages can hide a mixture of strategies.

What is the difference between cognitive and metacognitive strategies?

Cognitive strategies work directly on the task, such as summarizing or rehearsing. Metacognitive strategies work on one's own thinking, such as planning, monitoring understanding, and deciding when to switch strategies.

Can strategies be taught to young children?

Yes. Research on production deficiency showed that young children can use strategies such as rehearsal when prompted, and studies of reciprocal teaching and SRSD have shown benefits for students in the primary and middle grades. Effective teaching usually includes modeling, guided practice, and explanation of when and why the strategy is useful.

Which study strategy has the strongest evidence?

In Dunlosky and colleagues' 2013 review, practice testing and distributed practice received the highest ratings for usefulness across many kinds of learners, materials, and tests.

Why do children sometimes use a slower strategy when they know a faster one?

Often because they are less confident that the faster strategy will give the right answer on that problem. Research on adaptive strategy choice shows that falling back to a slower, more reliable strategy on difficult problems can improve overall accuracy.

Do adults use multiple strategies too?

Yes. Adults use a mix of retrieval and calculation in arithmetic, choose among decision strategies depending on time pressure and complexity, and shift among reading and study strategies depending on their goals.

Summary

Cognitive strategies are the methods people use to think: to calculate, remember, read, write, plan, and decide. Early work by Pólya and by Newell and Simon treated problem-solving methods as describable procedures, and Gagné made cognitive strategies a core category in instructional theory. Flavell's research on metacognition and production deficiencies showed that knowing a strategy is not the same as using it. Siegler's work on children's arithmetic overturned the idea that children use one strategy at a time, showing instead that they choose adaptively among several and that strategies rise and fall like overlapping waves. Research on teaching, including reciprocal teaching, Self-Regulated Strategy Development, and reviews of study techniques, shows that strategies can be taught effectively, especially when instruction is explicit, includes metacognitive guidance, and is embedded in real content. The common thread is that skilled thinking is not just knowing facts or having ability, but knowing how to go about a task and choosing well among the ways one might do it.

Sources

• Cognitive strategy, Wikipedia
• Dunlosky et al., "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques," Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2013)
• Association for Psychological Science, "Which Study Strategies Make the Grade?"
• Palincsar and Brown (1984), Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities, summary at Reading Rockets
• Rosenshine and Meister, "Reciprocal Teaching: A Review of the Research" (1994)
• Dignath and Büttner (2008), "Components of fostering self-regulated learning among students," Metacognition and Learning
• Hattie, Biggs and Purdie (1996), "Effects of learning skills interventions on student learning: A meta-analysis"
• Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara and Harris (2012) and related SRSD meta-analyses, summarized in Journal of Writing Research
• Forestier and Oudeyer, on modeling the overlapping waves theory
• Metacognition, Wikipedia