The role of metacognition in monitoring performance and regulating learning in early readers

Abstract

Metacognition refers to the capacity to reflect upon our own cognitive processes and its contribution to learning and academic achievement remains subject to ongoing debate. However, little is known about its developmental trajectories when children begin to receive formal education in reading. Here, we evaluate the metacognitive efficiency of children aged between 6 and 7 years old (N=60) in four reading-related linguistic discrimination tasks and one non-linguistic task unrelated to reading skills. First, we investigated how metacognition on these tasks related to performance measured in standardized reading tests and to sensitivity indexes in the reading-related linguistic tasks. Second, we assessed whether these developing readers recruited common metacognitive mechanisms across the different task domains. Third, we explored whether metacognition in this early stage was related to the longitudinal improvement in performance in a linguistic and a non-linguistic task. No association was found between students’ metacognition in the reading-related linguistic tasks and performance on the standardized reading tests, notwithstanding performance correlated across these tasks. We found some evidence consistent with shared metacognitive mechanisms monitoring performance across tasks. Remarkably, metacognitive ability significantly predicted children’s performance improvement across domains a year later. These results suggest that the development of metacognitive processing may be dissociated to some extent from reading-related linguistic abilities and non-linguistic abilities during the early stages of formal education. Nevertheless, it may play a fundamental role in guiding students' learning across domains. These data highlight the importance of creating educational programs fostering students’ metacognition as a long-term learning tool.

Age-related decreases in global metacognition are independent of local metacognition and task performance

“…We extend this line of research to document the change in cross-domain covariance with age, finding that domain-generality was already established in our youngest age group (18-27 years old) and remained stable into older age. Notably, previous work on the early development of metacognition has suggested it to be more domain-specific in childhood: only limited association between metacognitive abilities measured across tasks has been shown in 5-to 8-year-olds undertaking visual numerical and emotional discrimination tasks, or in 6-to 7-year-olds undertaking reading and emotional tasks (Vo et al, 2014, Taouki et al, 2021. Given that metacognition continues to develop through childhood and adolescence (Weil et al, 2013, Fandakova et al, 2017, it remains to be determined if and when a transition from domain-specific to domain-general metacognitive capacities occurs during this period.…”