The role of metacognitive monitoring in regulating learning in early readers

Abstract

Metacognition refers to the capacity of reflecting upon our own cognitive processes. There is an ongoing discussion in the literature on the role of metacognitive monitoring in learning and academic achievement. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of metacognitive functions during the first years of primary school, when children start learning how to read. In the context of the present thesis, a within-subject longitudinal study was designed in order to evaluate students¿ metacognitive monitoring ability in tasks related to orthographic lexical processing and its prerequisites, and a non-reading related task, during earlier and later stages of reading development (from Grade 1 to Grade 3). A cutting-edge hierarchical Bayesian Signal Detection Theory model was used for the estimation of metacognitive ability in each task. The main goals of this study were threefold. First, we aimed to investigate how metacognitive monitoring develops within linguistic and non-linguistic tasks during the first years of primary school. Second, we assessed whether or not young children recruit common or domain-specific mechanisms supporting metacognition across the different task domains and whether this pattern changes between Grade 1 and Grade 3. Third, we sought to examine how and if metacognitive monitoring ability (i.e. how confidence ratings track accuracy in the task) and task performance in the linguistic and non-linguistic tasks, relate to students¿ standardized reading ability during the first years of primary school and whether early metacognitive ability in reading-related tasks, can predict students longitudinal improvements in students reading performance.