Bulletin of Adult and Continuing Education

Constructing a learning-centered environment to facilitate and enhance learning has been enthusiastically advocated by many scholars and researchers in recent years. While much effort has been expended on designing a good learning environment, the fact that the success of a learning-centered environment lies not merely in restructuring the environment external to the learners, but also in enabling learners to cultivate internal reflection upon their own learning processes, has often been overlooked. The author believes that teaching students how to exercise their mental processes, especially higher-order thinking processes, could enable them to take the responsibility for learning, instead of overrelying on the teacher's instructional or designing efforts.

Cognitive psychologists have identified the way one exercises mental processes as the most significant determinant in successful learning. Flavell (1978) coined the phrase "metacognition" for the way learners control and direct their own mental processes. Since then, metacognition has received more and more attention and has been addressed in various learning contexts.'In the past decades, more and more researchers take interest in exploring the essence of metacognition, and in constructing instructional models for promoting its learning. A great deal of research supports the importance of metacognition in cognitive development and academic learning (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983; Paris & Lindauer, 1982; Wellman, 1983; Paris, Wasik, & Vander Westhuizen, 1988; Pressley, Borkowski, & O'Sullivan, 1985). It has been widely recognized that learners who are metacognitively active tend to perform better on cognitive tasks than those who are not.

Up to the present, research in metacognition covers several primary areas, such as the enhancement of disabled-student learning, science learning, reading comprehension, and problem solving. With the successful application in these areas, the role of metacognition is becoming prominent. It has received more and more attention in both educational and training contexts, like the other higher-level thinking skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving and inquiry (Redding, 1990; Leshin, Pollock & Reigeluth, 1992). Nevertheless, despite the fruitful ffndings in the literature, scholars do not agree on the definition of metacognition and have defined it differently in the course of the past decades ( Jones & Idol, 1990). This has caused much confusion and remains a thorny problem to be solved. While the evolution of the diverse definitions of metacognition can be attributed to the new discoveries in learning psychology and people's different uses of metacognition (Jones & Idol, 1990), there is a need to explore the essence of metacognition from alternative perspectives.

In this paper, the author examines the relationship of metacognition to other mental processes, the neglected facets of metacognition, and other considerations of this concept. She also illuminates metacognitive processes from a set of new conceptions. It is expected that the expanded views of metacognition presented in this paper could guide researchers to view metacognition from a more dynamic and synthetic perspective. The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide alternative interpretation of metacognition in order to direct more research effort on the construction, rather than application, of metacognitive theory.

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