Poster #10 - Do Children’s Metacognitive Monitoring Skills Vary Across Different Tasks and Measurement Approaches?

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Children’s metacognitive skills have been assessed with a range of different measurement approaches such as confidence judgements, teacher or self-reports, and child observations (Sperling et al., 2002; Whitebread et al., 2009). While observational quasi-naturalistic measurement approaches are argued to better capture children’s spontaneous metacognitive skills, they are rarely used and few studies have applied different measurement approaches with the same sample (Marulis & Nelson, 2021). Hence, little is known regarding how the different measurement approaches are associated with one another and it is not clear if, for example, children’s monitoring abilities when prompted to provide judgments correspond to their spontaneously occurring monitoring skills in everyday situations (Bryce & Whitebread, 2012).
In this study we assess children’s monitoring skills with highly structured, computerized tasks as well as with quasi-naturalistic child observations. We apply the Odd One Out task (adapted from Alloway, 2006) to assess children’s monitoring accuracy on a working memory task and the Animal Stroop task (Bryce et al., 2011) to measure children’s monitoring accuracy on an inhibitory control task. In both tasks, after each trial, children are asked to provide a monitoring judgment on their performance (accuracy or reaction time respectively). Children also complete two quasi-naturalistic construction tasks, the Wedgits Puzzle task (Marulis & Nelson, 2021) and the Train Track task (Bryce & Whitebread, 2012). In both tasks, children are shown a picture of a structure/shape (pyramid puzzle or train track) and they are asked to build that structure/shape. Children are videoed while building. Observational coding (Bryce & Whitebread, 2012) will be applied to assess children’s metacognitive monitoring skills. The effectiveness of children’s monitoring will be compared across these tasks to determine if children’s ability to monitor when prompted in computerized tasks corresponds to their spontaneous monitoring abilities in quasi-naturalistic tasks (see Figure 1). Specifically, whether children who can make more accurate judgments when prompted also tend to more frequently spontaneously monitor themselves.
Pilot data of German first and third grade children’s monitoring accuracy on the two highly structured tasks (Odd One Out and Animal Stroop) indicated no significant association. Children made more accurate monitoring judgements on the working memory task than the inhibitory control task, F(1, 56) = 13.68, p < .001, np2 = .2. At this point, no data is available for the quasi-naturalistic observations. By the time of the conference, data collection and analysis with a larger sample will be completed.
It is anticipated that this project will provide valuable insights regarding the transferability of research findings from experimental research to more applied research conducted in school contexts. In turn, these findings could complement and inform future research on how best to support and train metacognitive skills in school-aged children.

Authors

• Janina Eberhart, University of Tübingen
  Presenting Author

• Donna Bryce, University of Tübingen