Extending past research showing that regulative activities (metacognitive and relational) can aid learning, this study tests whether sequences of cognitive, metacognitive and relational activities affect subsequent cognition. Scaffolded by a computer avatar, 54 primary school students (working in 18 groups of 3) discussed writing a report about a…

"Self-directed speech"--the audible or partially whispered self-talk that children engage in during their daily activities, was proposed by Vygotsky to have a mediating role in the emerging self-regulatory behaviour of young children. Studies with correlational findings tend to lend support to this hypothesis but fail to delineate the…

Referring to current research on self-regulated learning, we analyse individual regulation in terms of a set of specific sequences of regulatory activities. Successful students perform regulatory activities such as analysing, planning, monitoring and evaluating cognitive and motivational aspects during learning not only with a higher frequency…

This study investigated what types of learning patterns and strategies elementary school students use to carry out ill- and well-structured tasks. Specifically, it was investigated which and when learning patterns actually emerge with respect to students' task solutions. The present study uses computer log file traces to investigate how…

Metacognition and self-regulation are important for developing effective learning in the classroom and beyond, but novice learners often lack effective metacognitive and self-regulatory skills. However, researchers have demonstrated that metacognitive processes can be developed through practice and appropriate scaffolding. Betty's Brain, an…

New methods for gathering and analyzing data about events that comprise self-regulated learning (SRL) support discoveries about patterns among events and tests of hypotheses about roles patterns play in learning. Five such methodologies are discussed in the context of four key questions that shape investigations into patterns in SRL. A framework…

This study focuses on relations between 7- and 9-year-old children's and adults' metacognitive monitoring and control processes. In addition to explicit confidence judgments (CJ), data for participants' control behavior during learning and recall as well as implicit CJs were collected with an eye-tracking device (Tobii 1750).…

Decision-making is a complex process that is largely studied from an experimental perspective or in specific organizational contexts. As such, no generalizable framework exists with which to study decision-making from an individual differences perspective for predictive/selection purposes. By generalising a context-specific decision model proposed…

Learners often have difficulties comprehending multiple texts about controversial scientific issues. In particular, learners with strong prior beliefs tend to construct a one-sided mental representation that is biased towards belief-consistent information (text-belief consistency effect). In the present study we examined the effectiveness of…

In metacognition research, many studies focused on metacognitive knowledge of preschoolers or children at the end of elementary school or secondary school, but investigations of children starting elementary school are quite limited. The present study, thus, took a closer look at children's knowledge about mental processes and strategies in…

When dealing with complex conceptual systems, low-prior- knowledge learners develop fragmentary and incorrect understanding. To learn complex topics deeply, these learners have to (a) monitor understanding to detect flaws and (b) generate explanations to revise and repair the flaws. In this research we explored if the detection of a flaw in…

This paper addresses the nature and significance of productive engagement in cognitive activity and metacognitive regulation in collaborative learning tasks that involve complex scientific knowledge. A situative framework, combining the constructs of social regulation and content processing, provided the theoretical basis for the development of a…

This article explores the effect of computerized scaffolding with different scaffolds (structuring vs. problematizing) on intra-group metacognitive interaction. In this study, we investigate 4 types of intra-group social metacognitive activities; namely ignored, accepted, shared and co-constructed metacognitive activities in 18 triads (6 control…

This study investigated whether and, if so, how metacognitive knowledge can be assessed validly in students with special educational needs in a large-scale assessment like the German National Educational Panel Study. In total, 804 sixth-grade students including both regular school students attending the lowest track of secondary education…

The focus of the present study is on the developmental antecedents of domain-general experimentation skills. We hypothesized that false-belief understanding would predict the ability to distinguish a conclusive from an inconclusive experiment. We conducted a longitudinal study with two assessment points (t1 and t2) to investigate this hypothesis.…