Principle 06
Metacognitive Prompting
Check whether you only feel like you understand.
- Function
- Calibration and strategy revision
- Substrates
- Anterior PFC (BA10) · dACC · insula
- Intervention
- Comprehension checks, boundary questions
- In transfer
- Kills the illusion of explanatory depth.
People overestimate how well they can explain a mechanism until they try. The useful prompts are not ‘do you understand?’ but ‘where does this mapping fail?’ and ‘state the target mechanism in target-native terms without the source vocabulary.’
Without a forced break list, analogical transfer overshoots: every market is a fluid, every org is a gas. If you cannot name three breaks, you are still in surface matching.
Flavell 1979; Schraw & Dennison 1994; Zimmerman 2002