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Monitoring competence sometimes referred as metacognitive monitoring is a metacognitive skill. It can be described as the ability to distinguish what one knows. A high level of monitoring suggests one can make more accurate assessments of one's skill or knowledge. Therefore it can been seen as an important skill for self-regulated learning as well as having links to critical and rational thinking. Monitoring has also been used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Definition
Monitoring competence is defined as awareness of one's comprehension as well as task performance. This equates to the ability to recognise how well one understands a topic; or recognising how well one performed during a task, including understanding how effective a particular strategy is to perform the given task. Metacognitive monitoring can also be applied to one's current state of knowledge. One example of this is when a person makes a confidence judgment on whether they know the answer or not to a question or puzzle to accomplish a task. Monitoring has been identified as an important aspect of metacognition. Monitoring comes under metacognitive regulation, which refers to "active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration" of cognitive processes. This includes both top-down cognitive processes (such as error correction) and bottom-up cognitive processes (such as error detection). Along with monitoring, metacognitive regulation includes other components such as planning, information management, debugging strategy and evaluation. These processes act to regulate and supervise task performance, as well as checking the outcomes of those cognitive activities. Monitoring competence can relate to the task, the strategy selected for said task, as well as the answer given, and therefore it is seen as central to current models of self-regulated learning.

Application
The accuracy of monitoring is seen as an important aspect of education as metacognition is associated with higher academic performance. This is crucial as reports have found that students are leaving school ill-equipped for the learning styles needed for higher education, as well as the work place. The more important deficits identified were a lack of competency associated with higher level cognitive processes such as metacognition, critical thinking, and rational thinking. This is due, in part, to the teaching and assessment methods in schools help establish the formation, and reinforcement of, detrimental learning styles. This has led to a focus of governments in the developed world to increase students' proficiency in metacognition and critical thinking. Monitoring accuracy can be increased using confidence ratings and feedback. Currently research suggests that an increase in metacognitive monitoring can led to an increase in critical thinking.

Metacognition has also been linked to other areas of psychology, such as mental health. It has been associated with mindfulness and is being utilised in therapy for mood disorders as well as depression. This may be due to a possible deficit in metacognitive monitoring of dysfunctional thinking patterns observed in individuals suffering from depression. In recent years, research has focused on metacognition and how it may be applied in therapy for other disorders, such as personality disorders, general anxiety, and schizophrenia.

As young adulthood is an age where people may be particularly susceptible to mental health problems, helping to increase their metacognition could have benefits for their long-term mental health as well as educational achievement. With a relatively easy and cost-effective method for increasing monitoring accuracy, by asking for a judgment on where the answer the person gives is right or wrong, this could be seen as an area that can be developed quickly and at most levels of education.

Metacognition
Metacognition can be divided in to two parts, metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation. Metacognitive knowledge includes declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and conditional knowledge. Declarative knowledge is awareness of oneself and what may influence task performance. Procedural knowledge is the awareness of cognition, including the knowledge of strategies. Conditional knowledge is understanding how and when to use a given strategy. Metacognitive regulation monitors cognition as well as the use of metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive monitoring is seen as a vital aspect of this process.

Metacognition is seen as a separate concept to intellectual ability. The two concepts are linked however and do develop alongside each other. Metacognition does contribute uniquely towards learning and can be seen as a powerful predictor of learning performance.

Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has been defined as  '..purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of...which that judgement is base' . A simpler way of defining critical thinking is  'being willing to consider something in a thoughtful way' . Similar to metacognition, critical thinking is seen as separate to intellectual ability. Critical thinking can be learned, and metacognition appears to be integral to that process.

Critical thinking can be divided in to five aspects: Inference, recognition of assumption, deduction, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments. Each of these five aspects have been positively linked to each of the eight components of metacognition (metacognitive knowledge and regulation). Recent research has focused on the relationship between metacognitive monitoring and critical thinking, finding that an increase in one also had an increase in the other. Therefore metacognitive monitoring can be seen as an important aspect of critical thinking.

Rational Thinking
Defining rational thinking in literature has been difficult, however there has been a consensus that rationality is a lack of bias in reasoning. This was built upon Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work on decision making. They found that individuals tended to rely on the use of cognitive heuristics and cognitive biases for complex tasks which led to mistakes. Keith Stanovich took this research further by looking at these biases and heuristics, finding that intellectual ability only accounted for some of them.

When comparing performance on rational thinking tasks and critical thinking tasks, there appears to be a positive link. It has also been found that individuals who display good critical thinking skills are less likely to engage in cognitive biases and heuristics. This has led to the belief that rational and critical thinking are not separate construct, but rather that rational thinking encompasses critical thinking. Therefore with the relation between rational thinking and critical thinking being close, metacognition has an influence over rational thinking with monitoring having a key role for individuals who do not follow cognitive biases or heuristics during rational thinking tasks.

Self-Regulated Learning
Self-regulated learning is the emphasis of autonomy and control by the individual who monitors, directs, and regulates actions toward goals of information acquisition, expanding expertise, and self-improvement. It is guided by metacognition, strategic action, feedback, and motivation. Students who display better self-regulatory skills tend to achieve higher academic success. It has also found that self-regulated learners have higher self-efficacy. Deep learning, as opposed to rote, or surface learning, has been linked to self-regulated learning, as well as critical thinking and metacognition.

Self-regulated learners are better at discriminating between what they do and do not know. This is due in part to their increased ability in metacognitive monitoring. This allows them to set more accurate goals when assessing their learning, which can help to further enhance it.