Metacognition, self-regulation and self-regulated learning: what’s the difference?

In 2018, the Education Endowment Foundation published some guidance for schools on Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning, which we are told provides ‘high impact for very low cost, based on extensive evidence’ (p. 4). Naturally, schools are keen to put these impactful ideas into practice. However, teachers are not always clear about what ‘metacognition and self-regulated learning’ means, or what it looks like in the classroom. This is not surprising, because education researchers aren’t always clear about what it means, either. Dinsmore et al. (2008) reviewed 255 studies in an attempt to determine the ‘core meaning of metacognition, self-regulation and self-regulated learning, as well as where these constructs converge and diverge’ (p. 392). This review found that only 49 per cent of the studies provided explicit definitions, and that where this did happen, there was considerable overlap between the three constructs. In their guidance, the EEF attempted to simplify