ABSTRACT
Task-specific skills are an essential part of learning and doing, but too often formal education neglects the executive processes which control and regulate the use of skills in learning tasks or problems. Enlightened teaching methods can make considerable headway in training the strategies as procedures which learners can adopt to encourage a more efficient approach to problems and tasks. Macro-strategies are highly generalisable, seem to improve with age and are all characterised by the demands they make upon the learner's knowledge of himself and his own thinking and learning aptitudes and problems. The 'mind-management' strategies will probably determine the success with which micro-strategies and skills are acquired and used, and may hold a clue to altering the central affective and motivational characteristics of the learner. Metacognition concerns knowledge of one's own mental processes. This awareness is an essential ingredient of many of the strategic activities.
