Young Children Bet on Their Numerical Skills

Abstract

Metacognition, the ability to assess one’s own knowledge, has been targeted as a critical learning mechanism in mathematics education. Yet, the early childhood origins of metacognition have proven difficult to study. Using a novel nonverbal task and a comprehensive set of metacognitive measures, we provide the strongest evidence to date that young children are metacognitive. We show that children as young as 5 years make metacognitive “bets” on their numerical discriminations in a wagering task. However, contrary to previous reports from adults, children’s metacognition proved to be domain-specific: children’s metacognition in the numerical domain was unrelated to their metacognition in another domain (emotion discrimination). Moreover, children’s metacognitive ability in only the numerical domain predicted their school-based mathematics knowledge. The data provide novel evidence that metacognition is a fundamental, domain-dependent cognitive ability in children. The findings have implications for theories of uncertainty and reveal new avenues for training metacognition in children.

Behavioral and Neural Indices of Metacognitive Sensitivity in Preverbal Infants

“…Our findings are in line with theoretical frameworks proposing that metacognitive sensitivity stems from simple evaluations of the quality of internal representations [1, 6, 7, 8]. These rudimentary neural computations could in principle already be present in the infant brain [33]. One possibility is thus that metacognitive operations are computed automatically as soon as infants start making decisions.…”

“…Yet verbally reporting one’s own mental states involves more than pure metacognitive monitoring [34, 35]. Consistent with this idea, metacognition has been found to involve both explicit and implicit processing modes in adults [15, 34, 35, 36], and a few recent studies found that children can pass metacognitive tasks at younger ages when no verbal report is required [31, 33, 37]. In particular, we found that 20-month-old infants are able to ask for help non-verbally in order to avoid making errors [37].…”

“…This might seem surprising, because previous research relying on verbal reports documented a late emergence of the ability to provide accurate metacognitive judgments, around 3–4 years of age [3, 4, 5, 31, 32, 33]. Yet verbally reporting one’s own mental states involves more than pure metacognitive monitoring [34, 35].…”

Changing the precision of preschoolers’ approximate number system representations changes their symbolic math performance

“…Future research could test this possibility by investigating the influence of ANS confidence hysteresis on children’s error patterns in symbolic math problems. Another possibility is that ANS precision plays no direct or supporting role as children attempt to solve math problems, but rather that children experience a sense of self-efficacy that is specific to the mathematical domain (Hackett & Betz, 1989; Vo, Li, Kornell, Pouget, & Cantlon, 2014). That is, ANS confidence hysteresis might affect children’s internal sense of their ability to reason about quantities.…”

Exploring the relationship between metacognitive and collaborative talk during group mathematical problem-solving – what do we mean bycollaborativemetacognition?

“…Metacognitive knowledge (Özsoy, 2011;Schneider & Artelt, 2010) and cognitive regulation (Morosanova, Fomina, Kovas, & Bogdanova, 2016) are both associated with higher levels of mathematical achievement. Numerical metacognitive knowledge in young children (aged five) can predict levels of mathematical knowledge at school (Vo, Li, Kornell, Pouget, & Cantlon, 2014). Metacognitive beliefs and monitoring are also associated with mathematical problem-solving performance in primary school students (Cornoldi, Carretti, Drusi, & Tencati, 2015).…”