Co-Principal Investigator: Lisa Son (Barnard College)

Purpose: This project will examine children's metacognitive skills, or the ability to assess one's own thought and learning processes. By examining children's use of these skills and strategies, the researchers will then be able to devise interventions addressing weaknesses in this area and remediate them in order to improve learning. By building metacognitive skills and control strategies, children could be better positioned to assess their own knowledge so that they can more effectively allocate and organize study time and effort optimally, and to improve learning more generally. The focus of this research project will be on children in 3rd and 5th grades.

Project Activities: The researchers will conduct a series of eight experiments designed to examine questions about the ability of third and fifth graders to: (1) make metacognitive judgments; (2) convert metacognitive knowledge into viable study choice strategies; (3) make optimal judgments about which items are likely to be easiest to learn and how studying items that they judge the easiest to learn or that are normed as easy to learn might enhance learning; and (4) make choices regarding spacing of practice based on their judgments of learning. In addition, researchers will examine how honoring or not honoring children's own metacognitive judgments may affect learning.

Products: The products from this study include a better understanding of metacognitive processes in children and their relation to learning, and published reports.

Structured Abstract

Purpose: This project will examine children's metacognitive skills, or the ability to accurately monitor one's own learning, and to use this knowledge to regulate one's own learning behaviors. By examining children's spontaneous use of metacognitive skills and strategies, the researchers will then be able to devise interventions addressing weaknesses in this area and remediate them in order to improve learning. By building metacognitive skills and control strategies, children could be better positioned to assess their own knowledge so that they can more effectively allocate and organize study time and effort optimally, and to improve learning more generally.

Setting: The schools are located in New York City.

Population: Participants will be third and fifth graders from a public school in New York City, and undergraduates at Columbia University. The public school is diverse, with the majority of students from Hispanic, African American, and European American backgrounds. Columbia's student population is about two-thirds European American, with Hispanics and Asian Americans comprising the largest minority populations.

Intervention: This project evaluates whether children in grades 3 and 5 can accurately monitor their own learning, and whether they can effectively regulate their own study behavior using metacognitive prompts. All of the experiments will be conducted within a shell, called the Columbia Dragon Master, a game-framing program devised by the researchers for use with at-risk middle-school children. The Dragon Master shell will use a gaming format to examine children's spontaneous use of metacognitive strategies to aid in the learning of classroom-relevant information and vocabulary (e.g., vocabulary terms used in children's science and social studies classes).

Research Design and Methods: A series of 8 multipart experiments will attempt to identify when children develop certain metacognitive skills. A within-participants experimental design will be used. Through these eight experiments, the researchers will: (a) test the metacognitive strategies used spontaneously by children and adults; (b) investigate the impact of children's own metacognition and control strategies on learning of grade-relevant information, vocabulary, and text; and (c) investigate the reasons for maladaptive strategies, that is, whether these are located in the metacognitive, the choice, or the perseverance components of the process.

Control Condition: The college students provide a control, with metacognitive capabilities presumably fully developed.

Key Measures: The key measure will be learning of material (e.g., vocabulary words, short texts), and the accuracy of students' own judgments of their learning, as measured in the Dragon Master computer game delivery format.

Data Analytic Strategy: Statistical analyses of the outcome data will use ANOVAs, planned comparisons, post hoc tests, and regression analyses.

Related IES Projects: Study Enhancement Based on Principles of Cognitive Science (R305H030175)

Products and Publications

Book

Dunlosky, J., and Metcalfe, J. (2009). Metacognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Book chapter

Metcalfe, J., and Dunlosky, J. (2008). Metamemory. In H.L. Roediger, III (Ed.), Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference (pp. 349–362). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.

Serra, M.J., and Metcalfe, J. (2008). Effective Implementation of Metacognition. In A. Graesser, D. Hacker, and J. Dunlosky (Eds.), Handbook of Metacognition and Education (pp. 295–317). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Journal article, monograph, or newsletter

Metcalfe, J., and Finn, B. (2011). People's Hypercorrection of High-Confidence Errors: Did They Know it all Along?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(2): 437–448.

Metcalfe, J., and Finn, B. (2012). Hypercorrection of High Confidence Errors in Children. Learning and Instruction, 22(4): 253–261.

Metcalfe, J., and Finn, B. (2013). Metacognition and Control of Study Choice in Children. Metacognition and Learning, 8(1): 19–46.

Metcalfe, J., and Kornell, N. (2007). Principles of Cognitive Science in Education: The Effects of Generation, Errors and Feedback. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(2): 225–229.

Metcalfe, J., Kornell, N., and Finn, B. (2009). Delayed Versus Immediate Feedback in Children's and Adults' Vocabulary Learning. Memory and Cognition, 37(8): 1077–1087.

Schwartz, B.L., and Metcalfe, J. (2011). Tip-Of-The-Tongue (TOT) States: Retrieval, Behavior, and Experience. Memory and Cognition, 39(5): 737–749.

Son, L. (2010). Metacognitive Control and the Spacing Effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36(1): 255–262.

Son, L.K., and Simon, D.A. (2012). Distributed Learning: Data, Metacognition, and Educational Implications. Educational Psychology Review, 24(3): 379–399.