Longitudinal Relations Between Uncertainty Monitoring, Executive Functioning and Academic Achievement During the Transition to Kindergarten.

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Children’s metacognitive ability and other higher-order abilities like executive functioning are foundational skills for success in educational settings. Children’s ability to monitor their subjective feelings of uncertainty i.e., engage in uncertainty monitoring, can guide behavior and determine the effectiveness of help-seeking and self-guided learning. Uncertainty monitoring is readily evident by middle childhood (e.g., Lockl & Schneider, 2004) with strong connections to academic outcomes during this period (Dunlosky and Rawson, 2012), and recent empirical work has illustrated that even preschool-aged children can engage in uncertainty monitoring in some cognitive tasks (Coughlin et al, 2014, Lyons & Ghetti 2013). In these tasks, uncertainty monitoring has been linked to judicious help seeking and selective response withholding; however, relations with broader measures of early academic achievement have yet to be established. In the current study, we explored the relations between children’s uncertainty monitoring and longitudinal measures of their academic abilities and executive functioning during the transition from preschool to kindergarten.
Participants came from a larger study of school readiness and executive functioning which recruited children enrolled in Head Start programs the year prior to kindergarten. During the Fall (N = 132) and Spring (N = 115) of the preschool year, children completed several cognitive tasks including the Woodcock-Johnson IV picture vocabulary test (Woodcock et. al., 2001) as well as the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) task (McClelland, et. al., 2014). In the Fall (N = 113) and Spring (N = 108) of kindergarten, children also completed a perceptual-judgement uncertainty monitoring task (Lyons & Ghetti, 2013) in addition to the HTKS and picture vocabulary task.
We found strong concurrent correlations between the HTKS and the picture vocabulary test at all four time points (rs > .41, ps < .001) and moderate correlations between uncertainty monitoring and the other tasks during the kindergarten year (rs > .22, ps < .01). To assess longitudinal relations, we fit separate linear longitudinal growth models to estimate an intercept and slope for children’s performance on the HTKS and picture vocabulary across all four time points. Because uncertainty monitoring was measured only twice, we could not fit a similar linear growth model. Instead, we utilized the last measurement of uncertainty monitoring as a time invariant predictor to estimate the relation between uncertainty monitoring in the Spring of kindergarten and the intercept and slope parameters from the other measures. For the HTKS, we found that uncertainty monitoring was related to the intercept (β = .27, p = .007) but not slope, (β = -.21, p = .300), whereas with the WJ picture vocabulary task, we found that uncertainty monitoring was related to the slope (β = .26, p = .019), but not the intercept (β = .034, p = .760).
Together, these findings illustrate important differences in how children’s metacognitive ability is related to the development of executive functioning and growth in children’s early academic abilities.

Authors

• Christopher Gonzales, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Alexis E Merculief, Oregon State University - Corvallis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Simona Ghetti, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Megan M McClelland, Oregon State University - Corvallis
  Non-Presenting Author