Abstract
In several studies it was shown that metacognitive ability is crucial for children and their success in school. Much less is known about the emergence of that ability and its relationship to other meta-representations like Theory of Mind competencies. In the past years, a growing literature has suggested that metacognition and Theory of Mind could theoretically be assumed to belong to the same developmental concept. Since then only a few studies showed empirically evidence that metacognition and Theory of Mind are related. But these studies focused on declarative metacognitive knowledge rather than on procedural metacognitive monitoring like in the present study: N = 159 children were first tested shortly before making the transition to school (aged between 5 1/2 and 7 1/2 years) and one year later at the end of their first grade. Analyses suggest that there is in fact a significant relation between early metacognitive monitoring skills (procedural metacognition) and later Theory of Mind competencies. Notably, language seems to play a crucial role in this relationship. Thus our results bring new insights in the research field of the development of meta-representation and support the view that metacognition and Theory of Mind are indeed interrelated, but the precise mechanisms yet remain unclear.
Highlights
Almost everybody has some memories about the first day in kindergarten or school and this transition from home to a new environment entails many new demands and challenges for children
The language background of 29.6% of the children was different from Swiss-German, a proportion that is representative for the population in Switzerland, all children were sufficiently fluent in the local language
After excluding children whose data set was not complete, the final sample consisted of N = 111 participants (4 children were missing at time 2, 4 children Theory of Mind” (ToM) data at time 1 were missing, and 40 children were excluded because no monitoring discrimination score could be computed due to insufficient variance in performance at one or both measure times)
Summary
Almost everybody has some memories about the first day in kindergarten or school and this transition from home to a new environment entails many new demands and challenges for children. In this context and under the label of “children’s school readiness”, self-regulatory processes including executive functions (Blair & Razza, 2007), attentional skills (Duncan et al, 2007), and precursors of academic skills (i.e. phonological awareness, Anthony, Williams, McDonald, & Francis, 2007) have attracted intensive research interest. The present study aims to bring them together in children in transition from kindergarten to school
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