This is the term for explaining how your brain monitors, evaluates, and regulates its thought process. It’s about how you go about solving problems, how you learn, or how you adapt to concepts you realize you don’t understand.
It operates on two levels: knowledge and regulation.
Metacognitive Knowledge covers what you know about your own mind. You may know that you are a procrastinator perfectionist, so you can take precautions against these behaviors.
Metacognitive regulation is how you manage your own mental states. It shifts between “modes” of thinking, like planning, monitoring, and evaluating.
For instance, Self-Monitoring is a skill that actively focuses on your performance during an activity. Self-correction is an evaluation mode that comes in when it fixes a mistake your self-monitoring skill detects.
For example, you may be giving a speech in a foreign language. During your performance, you are constantly monitoring how you pronounce words and use grammar rules. You are consciously paying more attention to listening to your speech, forming the words with your mouth and voice, and evaluating the results against the context of the foreign language.