A 3-year Longitudinal Investigation of Elementary Students’ Self-derivation and Metacognition

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Knowledge provides the means for educational and vocational success, rendering the acquisition of knowledge a crucial task across development. Knowledge is often thought to be learned directly from a book or a school lesson but knowledge is also gained through productive processes that allow one to extend beyond the content of a learning episode. A productive process and a pervasive means by which knowledge is acquired is self-derivation through the integration of separate yet related episodes of new learning. More specifically, in self-derivation learners integrate separate but related facts about educationally-relevant materials. Successful self-derivation of new knowledge has been observed in individuals across development, from early childhood (Bauer & Larkina, 2017; Bauer & San Souci, 2010) and into adulthood (Varga & Bauer, 2017). Across development, there is considerable age-related and individual variability in the success one experiences. Metacognition, “thinking about thinking (Flavell, 1979),” may be related to variability observed in self-derivation performance. Metacognition may support learners monitoring their knowledge for the facts necessary to self-derive new knowledge and it may also facilitate the steps necessary to successfully integrate and derive new knowledge.
To examine both the stability of self-derivation performance and the influence of metacognition on self-derivation performance within individuals over time, we conducted a longitudinal study of children’s self-derivation across grades 3 through 5. Each year, children learned pairs of related facts that could be integrated to self-derive new knowledge; the facts were different each year. At test for self-derivation, children made confidence judgments about their self-derivation performance. Over the 3 years children’s forced-choice self-derivation ranged from 46% to 58% correct. Correlation and regression analyses revealed significant stability in self-derivation performance such that Year 1 performance predicted performance at Years 2 and 3; Year 2 predicted Year 3. Indeed, Year 1 performance was the only unique predictor of performance at both Year 2 and Year 3.
In regards to metacognition,, children accurately judged their performance on 24% to 41% of trials on average over time. However, we did not observe significant age-related change or stability in children’s metacognition. Furthermore, the relation between self-derivation performance and concurrent metacognitive accuracy was significant for Years 1 and 3 but not for Year 2; there were no cross-lag relations. This pattern suggests that children may be relatively accurate in the judgments they make about their task performance but they struggle to utilize the metacognitive knowledge gained through monitoring to proactively improve subsequent task performance. Together, these data suggest that children’s self-derivation performance is stable as early as 3rd grade but their metacognition must continue to develop before it can make the meaningful contributions observed in adults’ metacognition about their self-derivation (Dugan & Bauer, 2020).

Authors

• Jessica Ann Dugan, Emory University
  Presenting Author

• Alena G Esposito, Clark University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia J Bauer, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author