The Effect Of Metacognition On The Mental Health Of Children In Primary School

With the development of contemporary cognitive psychology,meta-cognition arouses people's great attention.The research into meta-cognition has become one of the most popular projects on contemporary educational psychology.Meta-cognition means that as a proactive individual,a learner reasonably plans,arranges,monitors,adjusts and evaluates their learning tasks by consciously using meta-cognitive knowledge.The learner makes their own learning methods and processes more reasonable and effective by means of constant adjustments and improvements.Therefore,an effective learning process simply equals to one of applying meta-cognition to actively arranging,monitoring and adjusting the learning process itself.Meta-cognition has become a very hot area in language teaching,especially in reading comprehension.An increasing number of teachers and researchers have already noted the vital role of meta-cognition in a learner's mental state and academic achievement.Migrant children are a special group in modern society.Those whose parents are migrating in search of work are generally poor in English.Worse still,their parents are mostly poorly-educated.Worse of all,their parents usually come back home from work very late because of poor economic constraints or work alone,so that they have little time to push their children in terms of study.Compared with the textbooks used nationwide,the ones designed for Shanghai students are rather harder for migrant children.What we are most concerned about is how teachers help the migrant students do better academically,and achieve a higher sense of success and honor,relieving their anxiety and depression.This research project is an attempt to promote student reading comprehension in English through applying meta-cognition.Furthermore,meta-cognition can probably assist students in reducing their anxious and depressed moods,bettering their psychological adaptability,to formulate a good learning mode.This research project had surveyed 306 4th and 5th graders(of which 247 are migrant children)from two rural primary schools in Jiading District using questionaires,including questionaires on children's meta-cognition and quantitative graphs of depression and anxiety.Following it was an intervention in training meta-cognition in 23 migrant children.The study shows that1.There were negative correlation significantly seen between dimensions of meta-cognition and depression and anxiety.Meta-cognition could predicted significantly negatively anxiety and depression.2.Meta-cognitive training could reduced depression and anxiety effectively in migrant children of experimental group.3.Meta-cognitive training had obviously developed the English performances in migrant children of the experimental group.The better the meta-cognitive ability,the better the academic performance.