This study aimed at determining the effect of instruction in cognitive and metacognitive strategies on the students' educational self-esteem and academic performance. 87 students were selected through random sampling. The two first groups were consciously taught about cognitive and metacognitive strategies. All the classes were taught by the same teacher. Pourmoghaddasian’s self-esteem questionnaire (1994) was used to collect the data. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the pre- and post-test mean scores of the students’ self-esteem, their scores in the course, and their academic success in all the three groups. The results of one-way ANOVA revealed that there was no significant difference between the self-esteem measures of those students who were taught congnitive and metacognitive strategies as compared to those taught traditionally. However, there were significant differences between their total scores in the course and their academic success measures.