Speaking About Metacognition: A Developing Ability in Young Children

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1992
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
The development of metacognition in nursery school children was examined in this study. Our computer program encouraged the acquisition of a perceptual discrimination based on the density of dots in a rectangle. Children were rewarded with small, attractive stickers on correct responses, and were delayed from winning more stickers on incorrect responses. Once they attained the discrimination, the program made available a third response, one that provided an escape to the discrimination task and gave automatic rewards after a short delay. The most suitable explanation for escaping from a trial is that the subject is responding to a subjective internal state; he knows that he doesn't know. We also asked subjects to verbally describe their strategies for responding to the discrimination and for when they choose to escape from the discrimination. We found that the ability to verbalize about one's own metacognition is a fundamentally different and higherorder ability than is the ability to behave metacognitively. Even when children are capable of metacognition, they don't verbalize about that ability, suggesting that nonverbal stimuli and assessments are most appropriate for studying metacognition in children.
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