Four- and six- year-old children?s deployment of metacognition in multimodal number tasks.

SANTAMARIA, FLAVIA IRENE; VENTURA, ANA CLARA; SCHEUER, NORA

Zurich

Congreso; 8th International Biennal Conference of EARLI SIG 16 Metacognition; 2018

European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI)

Previous studies indicate that numerical metacognition may emerge before number conventions and principles are fully mastered. Here we intend to contribute to this line of research, with the following aims: 1. To capture the arc of metacognitive processes deployed by children in early educational stages as they solve number tasks. 2. To analyse the influence of task features, numerical accuracy of children?s proposed solutions, and children?s educational level. Forty children attending K4 and Y1 were individually interviewed, based on a semi-structured script of open questions. Tasks required children to represent number forms, definite quantities and indefinite quantities of different magnitudes in various semiotic modes, in relation to a variety of referents and of cognitive-communicational demands. A repertoire of number-related metacognitive processes was constructed. Its main dimensions are Communication and Regulation. Results suggest that children?s deployment of metacognition may be better understood in terms of fluid and situated sense-making than in terms of linear developmental trends, magnitude or modal constraints. Counting with a fine-grained repertoire of numerical metacognitive processes that integrates dimensions pertaining to communication and regulation might be a useful tool for researchers and teachers to capture children?s developing metacognitive processes in the dynamics of situated numerical thinking.