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The relationship between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences: Acquisition and re-elaboration

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Abstract

Six- to nine-year-old children participated in a training experiment concerning study and recall of categorized items. Explicit feedback given during training sessions was devoted to emphasize the relationship between strategy use and recall performance. Verbal descriptions of the contents of these training sessions were asked before a delayed post-test, given two weeks later.

It appears from the results that: (1) The degree of understanding of the information provided by training with explicit feedback, as indicated by subjects’ verbal descriptions, is a good predictor of strategy maintenance on the post-test. Explicit feedback provides subjects with information about the relationship between procedures and results. However, only those subjects who were able to re-elaborate this information were able to construct more permanent metacognitive knowledge; (2) Such a form of cognitive re-elaboration appears to be necessary for acquired metacognitive knowledge to have a regulatory effect on subsequent behavior; and (3) The level of a subject’s prior metacognitive knowledge seems to be one of the determinants in the ability to efficiently integrate new metacognitive knowledge by re-elaboration of metacognitive experiences.

Résumé

Quatre-vingt-dix enfants âgés de six à neuf ans ont participé à une expérience d’entraînement concernant l’étude et le rappel d’items catégorisables. Au cours des sessions d’entraînement, les sujets reçoivent un feed-back explicite dont la fonction est de mettre en évidence l’importance de la relation entre utilisation d’une stratégie de mémorisation et performance de rappel. Deux semaines après l’entraînement, les sujets sont soumis à un post-test précédé, pour certains d’entre eux, d’une demande de description des sessions d’entraînement.

Les résultats montrent que: 1) Le degré de compréhension de l’information qu’apportent l’entraînement et le feed-back, tel qu’en témoignent les verbalisations des sujets, est un excellent prédicteur du maintien de la stratégie lors du post-test. Le feed-back explicite donne à tous les sujets une information concernant la liaison entre procédures et résultats. Cependant, seuls les sujets qui ré-élaborent cette information sont en mesure de construire un savoir métacognitif plus permanent en termes de liaison entre but et moyens; 2) Une telle forme de ré-élaboration cognitive semble être nécessaire pour que le savoir métacognitif acquis exerce un effet régulateur sur les conduites ultérieures; et, 3) Le niveau de savoir métacognitif préalable à l’entraînement semble déterminant dans la capacité des sujets à acquérir un nouveau savoir métacognitif par la ré-élaboration des expériences métacognitives.

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Melot, AM. The relationship between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences: Acquisition and re-elaboration. Eur J Psychol Educ 13, 75–89 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172814

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