The Wisdom Of The Seesaw

It's an undoubted fact that preschoolers have cognitive ability.But as to whether they have metacognitive ability and at which level the ability is, different persons have different views.Generally speaking, researchers have been having a relatively negative attitude to the problem, while preschoolers themselves often over-estimate their ability unrealistically. Thus there has been an extreme unbalance in the seesaw of the intelligence development.On the basis of the hypothesis that "preschoolers have the metacognitive ability", the researcher adopted the methods of inquiry, activity-designing, as well as clinical methods and the microgenetic method. By quantitative analysis and qualitative description, the research draws a rough outline of the development of children's meta-cognition, and strives to find a communicating space between adult's culture and children's cultureMetacognition is the cognition about cognition. It's the knowledge or cognitive activity about any aspect of reflecting or adjusting one's cognitive course (Flavell,1981) . In our research, preschoolers' metacognition refers to preschoolers' cognition or adjustment of any aspect of their own cognitive process and the situations accompanying the process during their cognitive activities. Preschoolers' metacognition includes two states, the first of which is the static, such as the accumulation of preschoolers' knowledge of their metacognition, the second is the dynamic course, such as self-planning, self-adjustment and self-evaluation. The self-adjustment can be divided into two aspects: one is the processed-metacognition,that is the adjustment of the cognitive course (planning, carry-out, evaluation), the other one is the situated-metacogniton,that is the cognition of situations such as physical space , ? interpersonal situations of self, companions and teachers, which accompany preschoolers' metacognitive course. The knowledge, the experience and the adjustment of the metacognition simultaneously make up the three essential factors of preschoolers' metacognition, among which the accumulation of knowledge is the base, the transformation of the experience is the intermediary, while the adjustment is the key.The quantitative analysis shows that there are no remarkable differences between preschoolers' metacognitive ability from kindergartens of different types, and also metacognitive ability does not relate to the sex, while the age is a primary factor having a bearing on metacognitive ability. 5 years is a critical stage no matter to the accumulation of the knowledge, the enrichment of the experience or the development of the adjusting ability of preschoolers' metacognition. The strategy adjusting ability won't develop until 6. The research also shows that 5 years is a stage when preschoolers' awareness of problem and strategy is comparatively weak.The qualitative description shows that children have accumulated someconcerned knowledge about individual metacognition, but they are ignorant of how themselves get the knowledge; children possess some metacognitive strategies, but there are often production deficience and utilization deficiency ; children are less-conscious of the difficulties and the consciousness to ask questions is weak during the course of activities, but with the growing of their age, their emotional experiences in the activities increasingly appear to be dialectically-oriented. As to the metacognitive adjustment, the levels of the rationality of preschoolers' self-planning, the effectiveness of the self-adjustment, the consciousness of the self-inspection and the perfection of the self-evaluation are being continuously developed. Preschoolers' language adjustment to themselves and their adjustment to the situated cognition are outstanding, while tbe strategetic adjustment is usually inadequate, and the self-evaluation intends to be implicit self-esteem.There are two crucial ages to the development of preschoolers' metacognition, 18 months and 5 years. The development of preschoolers' metacognition is characterized as situational, diverse (in style, field and age), partial, changeable, selective and adjusting relying to private speech. The development of preschoolers' metacognition has the trends as following: the knowledge of the metacognition is developed from short to rich; the experience from superficial to profound; the planning from casual to self-conscious; the strategies from invalid to effective; the adjustment from other-controlled to self-controlled; the evaluation from absolute, sketchy, and qualitative to relative, careful and quantitative.Preschoolers' metacognitive ability is changeable. It will be improved if a processing, dynamic and developing research foresight can be formed in macroscopic, a good teaching and learning ecology can be created in mescopic and the accumulation of preschoolers' metacognitive knowledge can be increased in the microscopic, which has been proved by our short-time research in kindergartens. To create a favorable ecological environment for preschoolers' development of metacognition is actually to create the zone of proximal development of the metacognition for preschoolers.