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Young children's 'theory of mind' linked to subsequent metacognitive development in adolescence |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Wurzburg, Germany -- August 14, 2008 -- Metacognition refers to the awareness of one's knowledge in different areas. "Theory of Mind" (ToM) deals with very young children's understanding of mental life and the ability to estimate mental states. A new study in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education detects a systematic link between children's "theory of mind" as assessed in kindergarten and their metacognitive knowledge in elementary school. Wolfgang Schneider, Ph.D., of the University of Wurzburg examined 174 children who were either three or four years of age at the beginning of the study in order to investigate the relationship between early ToM and subsequent metacognitive development. ToM facilitated the acquisition of metacognitive knowledge. Early ToM competencies also affected the acquisition of metacognitive vocabulary, which in turn had an impact on developmental changes in metacognitive knowledge. Declarative metacognitive knowledge is usually scarce in young elementary children but increases considerably over the school years, predicting academic performance. Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE), recognized as the 2007 Best New Journal in the Social Sciences & Humanities by the Association of American Publishers' Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division, provides a forum for the accessible presentation of basic and applied research on learning and development, including analyses from biology, cognitive science, and education.
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