Rethinking 'thinking about your thinking': Identifying the role of metacognitive monitoring in academic learning through cognitive psychology methods in educational research.

Identifying the origin and correlates of individual differences in academic learning is a critical goal of educational sciences. This is because educational research aims to develop learning environments that are optimally tailored to accommodate these individual differences in academic learning, such as arithmetic. Metacognition has been put forward as highly relevant for learning, yet we lack a functional insight into the role of metacognition in academic learning due to several drawbacks in the existent literature. The current project will tackle these drawbacks by using an experimental approach with attention for ecological validity. Therefore, I will introduce a novel methodological approach to measure metacognitive monitoring during academic learning in children. Via carefully designed longitudinal and training studies, I will investigate the association between metacognitive monitoring and the learning of academic skills, such as arithmetic. I will also examine the causality of this association by experimentally manipulating monitoring during academic learning. This integrative approach is aimed to generate unique insights into the role of metacognitive monitoring in academic learning that are impossible to derive from the existing literature. This current research project can provide a critical breakthrough in designing effective learning environments in children.