While little empirical research has focused on talented readers, so too is little known about the relationship between metacognition and critical literacy. This mixed method qualitative study addresses both of these gaps in the research literature. One premise inspiring this study has been the declining performance of Australia's top-end reading scores in international assessments over the past decade. A recent media release by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) highlighted this disturbing trend from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted every three years by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with the finding that 'Australia's overall performance declined by 13 score points from 2000 to 2009. The decline (in reading) is primarily among higher achieving students' (Masters, 2010, online). In 2004 a review of the literature on talented readers by Reis et al. found much of it to be primarily anecdotal in nature with little research showing how to challenge and meet the learning needs of this group. With a better understanding needed of the self-systems that enable advanced reading skills clearly needed, this study used observations to explore the metacognitive processes adopted by young talented readers during critical literacy activities as compared with their typical peers. This study had a dual focus. First, to find out if critical literacy requires the employment of metacognitive strategies for successful analysis, understanding and critiquing of texts; and second, to discover if young talented readers are more adept at employing metacognition than their same-age peers, when interacting with critical literacy discourse.

The research field of metacognition sees a community lacking in rigour, continuity and shared understandings (Schraw, 2009; Shaughnessy, Veenman & Kleyn-Kennedy, 2008). The publication in 2011 of Pina Tarricone's conceptual framework and taxonomy of metacognition offered a 'comprehensive and systematic overview of the literature on metacognition' (Moshman, 2010, cited in Tarricone, 2011, p. xv), finally giving some necessary synthesis to the field. In this paper we briefly introduce some of the difficulties that continue to attribute to the inconsistency of metacognition as a concept and give an overview of Tarricone's taxonomy of metacognition. We also describe how the taxonomy contributes to deeper understandings of one popular model in gifted education. Current research is making strong links between metacognition and giftedness (Veenman, 2008), but importantly there is growing evidence that metacognition is an 'aspect of intelligence that can be more easily promoted by education' (Cornoldi, 2010, p. 257). Due to the complexity and detail of Tarricone's work and the actual taxonomy itself, it is acknowledged that this paper presents only a brief review and discussion of some of the aspects of the taxonomy, such as the supercategories of declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge. The importance of the interconnectedness of these aspects of Tarricone's framework is discussed in relation to how they underlie the metacognition and epistemic beliefs of a student to facilitate or inhibit learning.