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. Its contribution to reading development, when children start building their orthographic lexicon, still remains unknown. Here, we evaluate the metacognitive efficiency of children aged between 6 and 7 years old (N=60) in 5 experimental tasks; four linguistic tasks assessing orthographic lexical processing and a non-linguistic task unrelated to reading skills. First, we investigated how metacognition on the experimental tasks related to standardised on-paper reading performance, hence participants' general reading level. Second, we assessed whether these developing readers recruited common metacognitive mechanisms across the different experimental tasks. Third, we explored whether metacognition in this early stage was related to the longitudinal improvement in performance on a linguistic vs a non-linguistic task.No association was found between students' metacognition in the reading-related tasks and performance on the standardised reading tests, notwithstanding first-order performance correlated across these tasks. Remarkably, some negative correlations were noted between students' metacognitive ability in one task and task performance in another task. Moreover, we found some evidence consistent with shared metacognitive mechanisms for monitoring performance across tasks. Finally, metacognitive ability significantly predicted children's performance improvement across domains 10 months later. These results suggest that the development of metacognitive processing may be dissociated to some extent from readingrelated 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.

Measures of metacognitive efficiency across cognitive models of decision confidence

“…The gold standard to measure of metacognitive efficiency is meta-d'/d' (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012. Measuring metacognitive efficiency by meta-d'/d' has inspired research on many different psychological concepts, including learning (Bang et al, 2019;Boldt et al, 2019;Hainguerlot et al, 2018;Taouki et al, 2022), cognitive control (Drescher et al, 2018), vigilance (Maniscalco et al, 2017), memory (Mazancieux et al, 2020;Vandenbroucke et al, 2014), perception Odegaard et al, 2018), psychopathology (Bhome et al, 2022;Culot et al, 2021;Hauser et al, 2017;Muthesius et al, 2022;Rouault et al, 2018), beliefs about politicised science (Fischer & Said, 2021;Said et al, 2022), and visual awareness (Charles et al, 2013;Rausch & Zehetleitner, 2016;Vlassova et al, 2014). One reason why the meta-d'/d' method has become so popular is that meta-d' is believed to provide control over discrimination performance, discrimination task criteria, and confidence criteria (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012, which is a key requirement for measures of metacognitive accuracy (Barrett et al, 2013).…”

Students With High Metacognition Are Favourable Towards Individualism When Anxious

“…The low sample size could lead us to not find relations between variables due to their low effect and/or the low statistical power of our analyses (i.e., type-II errors). Indeed, post-hoc analyses and a review of studies with similar variables suggest a sample size at least twice as large ( Desender and Sasanguie, 2022 ; Taouki et al, 2022 ). With respect to the instruments’ selection, our study relied too heavily on self-report questionnaires.…”

Measures of metacognitive efficiency across cognitive models of decision confidence.

“…The gold standard to measure of metacognitive efficiency is meta- d ′/ d ′ (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012, 2014). Measuring metacognitive efficiency by meta- d ′/ d ′ has inspired research on many different psychological concepts, including learning (Boldt et al, 2019; Hainguerlot et al, 2018; Taouki et al, 2022), cognitive control (Drescher et al, 2018), vigilance (Maniscalco et al, 2017), memory (Mazancieux et al, 2020; Vandenbroucke et al, 2014), perception (Maniscalco et al, 2016; Odegaard, Chang, et al, 2018), psychopathology (Bhome et al, 2022; Culot et al, 2021; Muthesius et al, 2022; Rouault et al, 2018), beliefs about politicized science (Fischer & Said, 2021; Said et al, 2022), and visual awareness (Charles et al, 2013; Rausch & Zehetleitner, 2016; Vlassova et al, 2014). One reason why the meta- d ′/ d ′ method has become so popular is that meta- d ′ is believed to provide control over discrimination performance, discrimination task criteria, and confidence criteria (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012, 2014), which is a key requirement for measures of metacognitive accuracy (Barrett et al, 2013).…”