"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…

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).…

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 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.…

When studying verbal materials, both adults and children are often poor at accurately monitoring their level of learning and regulating their subsequent restudy of materials, which leads to suboptimal test performance. The present experiment investigated how monitoring accuracy and regulation of study could be improved when learning idiomatic…

Epistemic beliefs have been considered as important components of the self-regulatory model; however, their relationships with self-regulated learning processes in the Internet context need further research. The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between Internet-specific epistemic belief dimensions and self-regulated…

The ability to monitor the status of one's own understanding is important to accomplish academic tasks proficiently. Previous studies have shown that comprehension monitoring (metacomprehension accuracy) is generally poor, but improves when readers engage in activities that access valid cues reflecting their situation model (activities such as…

Since the 1970s, a large body of research has reported on the differences between deep and surface approaches to student learning. More recently, however, this metaphor for students' approaches to learning has been applied to the practice of teaching. Studies at the university level have identified two approaches to teaching: the information…

In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and…

The theoretical distinctions between metacognition, self-regulation and self-regulated learning are often blurred which makes the definition of co-regulation in group learning situations even more difficult. We have started to explore co-regulation in the context of decision making in simulated emergencies where medical teams work together to…

The current research examined the effects of a critical thinking (CT) e-learning course taught through argument mapping (AM) on measures of CT ability. Seventy-four undergraduate psychology students were allocated to either an AM-infused CT e-learning course or a no instruction control group and were tested both before and after an 8-week…

In the present study, associations between executive functioning, metacognition, and self-perceived competence in the context of early academic outcomes were examined. A total of 209 children attending first grade were initially assessed in terms of their executive functioning and academic self-concept. One year later, children's executive…

This article discusses measuring learning strategies by means of questionnaires. In "multi-method" research, in which think-aloud measures are compared with questionnaires, low or moderate correlations are found. A conclusion often drawn is that learners are not able to verbally report on their learning activities. Alternative explanations concern…