Abstract
Children are often overconfident when monitoring their learning, which is harmful for effective control and learning. The current study investigated children's (N = 167, age range 7-12 years) judgments of learning (JOLs) when studying difficult concepts. The main aims were (a) to investigate how JOL accuracy is affected by accessibility cues and (b) to investigate developmental changes in implementing accessibility cues in JOLs. After studying different concepts, children were asked to generate novel sentences and then to make JOLs, select concepts for restudy, and take a final test. Overconfidence for incorrect and incomplete test responses was reduced for older children in comparison with younger children. For older age groups, generating a sentence led to greater overconfidence compared with not being able to generate a sentence, which indicates that older children relied more on accessibility cues when making JOLs. This pattern differed in the youngest age group; younger children were generally overconfident regardless of whether they had generated sentences or not. Overconfidence was disadvantageous for effective control of learning for all age groups. These findings imply that instructions to encourage children to avoid metacognitive illusions need to be adapted to children's developmental stage. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 77-94 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Journal of Experimental Child Psychology |
Volume | 158 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2017 |
Keywords
- Metacognition
- Development
- Overconfidence
- Monitoring
- Control
- Cue use
- CONFIDENCE JUDGMENTS
- PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
- YOUNG-CHILDREN
- DECLARATIVE CONCEPTS
- DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE
- SCHOOL-CHILDREN
- SELF-REGULATION
- MEMORY
- ACCURACY
- MODEL