The Developmental Trends Of 4-6 Years Children's Metamemory Monitoring

Research on children's metamemory (i.e., their knowledge about memory processes and contents) has focused on two areas of research, namely, declarative or factual knowledge about memory and monitoring and regulation of memory processes. This experimental study was conducted to explore 4-6 years young children's metamemory monitoring abilities on ease of learning judgment (EOL) task, judgment-of-learning (JOL) task and confidence of judgment (JOC) task. Adopting the 3×2 (age, material) factor mixed experimental design and using | P - A|÷A as an index. There are 92 subjects were selected at random from kindergarten, including 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and 6-year-olds, the number of boys and girls in each age group are equal. All children were tested individually in quiet rooms of their kindergarten.The materials were all from Chinese books which the subjects of kindergarten had studied. The items were 16 pairs of objects presented on colored picture cards. The 16 items were divided into two blocks of 8 items (diverse card couples, artificial built card couples), which were presented in a balanced order. On each experimental trial, subjects were told that they were going to see 6/7/8 picture cards (the number of cards to choose according children's age). They were instructed to"try hard to learn the items"and were told that their task would be to recall the second picture of a given pair when prompted with the first picture of that pair. The subjects reported the number of memory before and after the materials had been assumed, then reported the picture cards couples which had been memorized, and assessed the degree of confidence. On the average, testing time was about 15 min per child. A MANOVA was conducted on the three kinds of metamemory monitoring judgments, with material type as a within-subject factor and age as between-subject factors. The results are as follows :( 1) 3 monitories accuracy (EOL, JOL, JOC) of 4-6 years children increase with age. (2) The effect of material was different in the development of the 3 monitory. There is a better accuracy of 3 monitory with the easier material. (3) The developmental level of the 3 monitory in the same age was different. (4) The rates of development of 3 monitories accuracy were different. The development of retrospective monitory was first. The second was recall readiness assessment. The development of easiness of learning judgment was third.