Metacognition and Children

Recent research in metacognition has described a sequence in young children's understanding of sources of knowledge (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Wimmer, Hogrefe & Perner, 1988; Sodian & Wimmer, 1987; Gopnik & Graf, 1988). In general, children can make use of knowledge before they can reliably identify the sources of that knowledge. The conclusion itself is unsurprising, but the effects of task variations in studies of this aspect of metacognition suggest some interesting structural properties of the observed agerelated differences. Under some circumstances, the perspective of another person can simplify, rather than complicate, the child's problem of identifying sources of knowledge. Depending on conditions, it is sometimes easier for young children to identify indirect than direct sources of information. As in other domains, the amount of support the child requires to perform correctly and reliably bears an inverse relation to the developmental complexity of performance.

The mistakes children make in identifying the sources of the information they possess demonstrate the extent to which they can distinguish knowledge from its sources. Both 3 and 4yearold children can assess whether they possess relevant information in a memory task; of the two groups, however, only 4yearolds can justify their belief that they know by pointing to relevant experience; fiveyearolds are far more reliable in justifying their beliefs than 4yearolds (Wimmer, et al., 1988). In add

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se employed in studies of the appearancereality distinction (Flavell, 1986; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Flavell, Shipstead & Croft, 1978). It is expected that subjects will have the less difficulty when asked to state whether another person has access to relevant information than when asked to identify the sources of their own information. The most difficult condition will be the one requiring identification of another's source of information. METHOD Study 1 It is possible that including visual stimuli that assist in the indentification of sources of information will facilitate the identification of the type of information that is the source of knowledge. Additional cues may permit very young children to display relatively high competence in the identification of knowledge sources. Fiveyearolds are not included because they were already performing near ceiling in the related study by Gopnik and Graf (1988). Subjects The participants in the present study will be 3 and 4yearold children attending oncampus daycare facility. There will be 32 children in each age group. Materials The materials for the target task consisted of six drawers (each 11 X 6 X 20 cm) in a th

Category: Psychology - M