Novel metacognitive problem-solving task for 8- to 11-year-old students

Metacognition is important for monitoring and regulation of cognitive processes, decision making, problem-solving and learning. Despite the widespread interest in metacognition, measuring metacognition in children poses a significant challenge. Some qualitative and observational measures exist, but they are restricted by the number of components they measure and the sampling size. Some meta-cognition tasks of memory have been developed for children, but these only measure a narrow range of skills involved in metacognition. A novel metacognitive problem-solving task, previously developed by the lab, provides scalable means to holistically measure metacognition. The thesis, developed a new coding scheme, recoded the data and studied the reliability and validity of the novel task by comparing it with demographic variables known to be associated with metacognition and a metamemory task. The results indicate the novel task is reliable and valid. It operationalizes metacognitive measures similarly to a classical metamemory task, suggesting that the new task could be a bridge between existing measures of metacognition in children and adults. The thesis uses the novel task to then explore other broader questions with 182, 8- to 11-year-old students, pertaining to cognitive levels in low socioeconomic status, ethnic-minority students, domain-generality/specificity of metacognition and the association between metacognition and executive-functions. The results indicate that low socioeconomic status, ethnic-minority students have poor cognitive levels and low amounts of cognitive development across the various age groups. The results also suggest metacognitive components to be domain-general in nature and were tapped into by the novel metacognitive problem-solving, metamemory and a complex executive-function tasks. The results provide further evidence for association between metacognition and executive-functions.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Master of Philosophy (MPhil)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Patel, Jwalin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ellefson, Michelle

• metacognitive control,
• metacognitive monitoring,
• problem-solving,
• metacognitive memory,
• secondary data analysis

Statement dc:rights

• Sample zoo map (p 48). ©2013 University of Cambridge (Michelle Ellefson, Zewelanji Serpell, Teresa Parr), used with permission from the Mind Match Chess Project. Sample memory-task image representation (p 50). ©2012 University of Cambridge (Michelle Ellefson, Zewelanji Serpell, Teresa Parr), used with permission from the Mind Match Chess Project; pictures taken from http://instructlab.educ.cam.ac.uk/thinkinggames/. 8 disc-tasks (p 52). ©2012 University of Cambridge (Michelle Ellefson, Zewelanji Serpell, Teresa Parr), used with permission from the Mind Match Chess Project; pictures taken from http://instructlab.educ.cam.ac.uk/thinkinggames/.

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4408424c-324e-434b-85ab-e56a37bcd1fd/download
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language

en

Author Identifier

0000-0003-3090-3334
0000-0003-0407-9767

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/288828