Development of a Metacognitive Thinking Test for Turkish Preschool Children

Young children’s metacognitive development is greatly important because metacognitive abilities increase children’s consciousness toward their own learning processes. In contrast to deficiency-based arguments regarding... [ view full abstract ]

Young children’s metacognitive development is greatly important because metacognitive abilities increase children’s consciousness toward their own learning processes. In contrast to deficiency-based arguments regarding children’s metacognitive abilities, recent studies have shown that children, as young as 3 year-old, are able to develop and show metacognitive awareness. In order to foster and respond to children’s emerging metacognitive skills, evaluation of these skills in early ages is essential. Literature shows that young children’s metacognition is usually tested and evaluated through interviews, visible thinking practices, narrative techniques based on drawing and writing, inner talking techniques and observations. However, in Turkish literature no specific instrument or technique identified for assessing young children’s metacognitive abilities has been encountered. That’s why, the aim of this research is to develop a metacognitive thinking ability test for 5-6-year-old preschool children based on early childhood metacognitive tests applied in different parts of world. In our test, children are firstly presented some semantically unrelated pairs of pictures and they are asked to learn these pairs. Then they are firstly expected to recall and tell the piece of information that has just been learnt (the pair of object), and secondly to evaluate the correctness of their recall on five point smiley scale.  In other words, during the test children firstly learn the paired associates, then try to recognize each object’s pair, and finally estimate whether their answer was correct or not by pointing out a relevant smiley (ranging from happy smiley for “very sure” to sad smiley for “very unsure”).  Test has been applied to 150 5-6 years old preschool children living in Ankara, Turkey. Each child has taken the test individually in a separate room. Results and implications will be presented in conference. 

Keywords: metacognition, 5-6 year-old children, metacognitive thinking test, early childhood