Thinking

The bad news: Our education system often skips one of them. This is problematic, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. To succeed over the long term, you have to master skill after skill . 

"Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge," shares psychology writer Annie Murphy Paul . "We're comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the 'metacognitive' aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows."

To wit, education research shows that low-achieving students have "substantial deficits " in their understanding of the cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. This, Paul says , suggests that part of the reason students perform poorly is that they don't know a lot about how learning actually works.