**Abstract**

In the twenty-first century, with the enormous increase in volume of information, students suffer from the cognitive overload that has been seen to be associated with incidence of depression/burnout amongst students at various levels of the training phase. This eventually leads to poor performance and lack of confidence in the younger generation. Effective strategies for efficient learning need to be informed to the learners to make them understand the importance of learning and retrieval at appropriate time. One such strategy is educating individuals metacognitively where the students will be able to build strong content knowledge by responding to varying demands of disciplines by critically synthesizing different resources and valuing sound evidence. Teaching students to be metacognitively aware through different strategies is also a challenge for teachers. Teaching students to ask themselves self-reflective questions and assess where they are right now (thinking about what they already know), how they learn (what is working and what is not), and where they want to be. With the aid of metacognition, students will be able to solve problems more effectively and take charge of their learning as self- regulated learners, which is essential in the current time.

**Keywords:** twenty-first century skills, metacognition, self-regulated learning, collaborative, creative thinking

### **1. Introduction**

The ubiquitous presence of technology in the current century has led to the development of a society that is primarily an information or knowledge society. With an explosion of information and the development of economic systems where ideas or knowledge function as commodities [1], society has developed numerous expectations from the current generation of professionals.

The extensive cognitive overload creates suffering for students, which is actually associated with an incidence of depression/burnout amongst them at various levels of the training phase. This eventually leads to poor performance and a lack of confidence in the younger generation.

Twenty-first century skills that have been identified as essential for survival include critical thinking and communication skills. Creativity, problem solving, perseverance, collaboration, information literacy, and technology skills [2, 3].

Out of these, collaboration is described as a *process* rather than an outcome of a group of activities, as it was earlier understood. There has emerged a need to differentiate collaboration from related activities such as cooperation and coordination. Gulati et al. [4] defined coordination as "the deliberate and orderly alignment or adjustment of partners' actions to achieve jointly determined goals," while they defined cooperation as the "joint pursuit of agreed-on goal(s) in a manner corresponding to a shared understanding about contributions and payoffs." Their definitions of coordination and cooperation seem closely related: both definitions refer to some action taken toward agreed-on, joint, or common goals.

Collaboration skills are both generic and content/context-specific in that the collaborative skills themselves do not typically vary across content areas.

Students can very well gather and transfer their skills, provided the content and context are relevant to the collaborative activity. When tasks involve offering resources, ideas, and efforts that are collaborative, students can contribute very effectively, considering that they have the relevant content knowledge. Collaboration is also intertwined with other cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies: effective collaboration requires communication skills, metacognition, self-direction, and so on.

Many tasks now require a specific level of comprehension of information [5]. Because of this, new competencies—often referred to as twenty-first century skills are required. Additionally, young people today need to be educated for jobs that do not yet exist but will come into existence soon with comparable primary tasks [6]. Anderson [1] cited the following as essential skills: Knowledge construction, followed by adaptability, information management, locating, organizing, and retrieving information, critical thinking, and teamwork. These competencies are also referred to as lifelong learning capacities [7].

The greatest problem a student faces when moving from high school to a professional college is the transition from the memorization of declarative knowledge emphasized in high schools to more advanced thinking skills required in colleges, such as critical thinking. To be successful, they need to demonstrate some personal characteristics, one of which is self-regulated learning habits, and the other is metacognitive awareness. Self-regulated learning (SRL) and metacognitive strategies are closely related concepts that involve learners taking an active role in their learning process. This chapter aims to understand the two processes and their relationships in developing the students of the twenty-first century for their survival.

### **2. What is self-regulated learning (SRL)**

Learning that is self-regulated is defined as the capacity of an individual to comprehend and manage his learning environment. Setting goals, self-monitoring, self-instruction, and self-reinforcement are all aspects of self-regulation [8].

Self-regulated learning refers to the ability of learners to set goals, monitor their learning progress, and regulate their cognitive processes, motivation, and behavior to achieve those goals effectively. It involves being aware of oneself as a learner and employing various strategies to control and optimize the learning experience.

*Perspective Chapter: Metacognitive Strategies – Preparing Self-Regulated Learners… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.114093*

Self-Regulated learning refers to a process that can be described through a selforiented feedback loop'.

Components of self-regulated learning typically include:

Planning: setting goals, creating a study schedule, organizing resources, and managing time effectively. Monitoring: evaluating one's progress, noting strengths and faults, and determining which areas need more focus or improvement.

Control: managing distractions, controlling motivation, and applying focused effort to learning activities.

Reflection: engaging in self-reflection, performance evaluation, and the identification of successful or unsuccessful techniques.

These processes help the learners transform their mental abilities into skills [9] and habits through a developmental process, emerging from guided practice and feedback [10, 11].

This practice makes the learners proactive, seeking out opportunities to learn and adapting their strategies as needed. They take responsibility for their learning and are motivated to achieve their goals, thus developing into self-regulated lifelong learners (**Figure 1**) [12].

How to develop a classroom culture grounded in self-regulated learning - role of teachers


### **Figure 1.**

*Characteristics of self-regulated learners.*

