תקציר:

Before participating in the teachers’ workshop, I used to address HOT in my teaching intuitively. But now I realize that doing so without explicitly addressing metacognition means that I had accomplished only a very small part of the job. (a participant in a teachers’ professional development workshop) Since the early days of studying metacognition, metacognitive training and instruction were shown to have positive effects on children’s performance in diverse fields. As we shall see in what follows, metacognition has both domain-general and domain-specific features. Therefore, it makes sense to study metacognition in general contexts as well as in the context of specific school disciplines and even in the context of more specific learning goals. Accordingly, the goal of this chapter is to present an overview of the role of metacognition in teaching higher order thinking (HOT) in science classrooms.