A core competency identified in Vision and Change for undergraduate biology students is the Ability to Apply the Process of Science. Here, we describe a three-week laboratory module for students in an Introductory Cell and Molecular Biology course. The goal of our module is to introduce students to the critical scientific process skill of metacognition early in their undergraduate careers, which is not only important for scientific research, but also for learning new concepts and other types of problem solving. To achieve this, our laboratory module engages students in the investigation of a biological research question while specifically and explicitly prompting students to practice the metacognition regularly employed by scientists. In our research module, students gather information, generate hypotheses, evaluate the utility of different experimental approaches in testing their hypotheses, planning experiments, and analyzing data. In-class and take-home activities prompt students to actively reflect on the information they use to design their experiments and to draw their conclusions. The module has been implemented several times in recent academic years, with two or three concurrent sections of the course taking part each academic quarter. Student evaluations and interviews suggest that this module provides a meaningful introduction to metacognition as it is used in scientific problem solving. Here we present the pedagogical structure of our laboratory module, which could be adapted to engage students in investigating a wide variety of research questions.