ability to monitor their progress. During this process, students ask questions like "What am I doing now?", "Is it getting me anywhere?", and "What else could I be doing instead?" Perkins and Salomon argue that such metacognitive practices help students to avoid unproductive approaches.

In the domain of experimental psychology, an influential distinction in metacognition (proposed by T. O. Nelson & L. Narens) is between Monitoring--making judgments about the strength of one's memories--and