Are we sure about our decisions at the age of 8?
An experiment will test the metacognitive abilities of children in Years 3, 4 and 5 of primary school
Are we sure of our decisions at the age of 8? The Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) has started the academic year at its JuniorLab laboratory, located at the Carmelitas Sagrado Corazón School in Vitoria, with new research projects that seek, on the one hand, to increase knowledge about metacognition, the ability to reflect on our mental processes, in children.
Pupils in Years 3, 4 and 5 of primary education will participate until December in a behavioural experiment consisting of a simple visual discrimination task to observe their metacognitive ability.
‘On a computer screen, students will have to identify whether a figure has lines oriented to the left or to the right. First, they will perform the task alone, then in pairs, and finally alone again. We will ask the children to rate their level of confidence in each decision, which is a key measure of metacognition,’ explains Francisca Campos Matías, a researcher with the BCBL’s Consciousness group.
This quality can have important educational benefits such as greater autonomous learning, improved academic performance, and the ability to apply what has been learned to new situations.
‘It helps us, for example, to recognise that we have made a mistake, to realise that we have forgotten something important, or to appreciate the confidence we have in our own knowledge. Our ultimate goal is to see if we can train this metacognition and promote better learning,’ adds the researcher.
