This chapter addresses the relation between two key factors that affect the speed of novices' knowledge acquisition. Both intellectual and metacognitive skills appear to be profound predictors of learning outcomes. It remains unclear, however, whether metacognitive skills are part of intelligence or to what extent they have their own virtue in novice learning. Over the past two decades we have conducted a number of studies in which participants of different age and from different educational backgrounds performed a variety of tasks in several school domains. Metacognitive activities, such as planning, monitoring, and reflection, were assessed by analyzing thinking-aloud protocols. Although correlated to intelligence, metacognitive skills appear to have a robust additional value for the prediction of novice learning on top of intelligence. Apparently, being gifted not only implies a high intelligence level, but also requires a well-developed repertoire of metacognitive skills that may help you to cope with new, unfamiliar learning tasks. Implications for the development of metacognitive skills over age and for the instruction of those skills are being discussed.