Developmental changes in uncertainty monitoring during an event recall task

The present study was conducted to examine developmental progression in children’s metacognitive monitoring competencies in the context of a complex memory task. 7- and 9-year-olds rated their confidence after answering questions in two different question formats (unbiased and misleading) and two different question types (answerable and unanswerable). Feeling-of-knowing judgments were gathered for questions that had previously been answered with “don’t know.” The results showed that children from both age groups appropriately differentiated between correct and incorrect answers to unbiased questions in their confidence judgments, between answerable and unanswerable questions, and appropriately showed lower confidence levels in their confidence judgments than in their feeling-of-knowing judgments. 9-year-olds proved to be further able to discriminate metacognitively between correct and incorrect answers to misleading answerable questions in their confidence judgments while 7-year-olds were not. The comparison of feeling-of-knowing judgments before correct and incorrect recognition indicated that metacognitive differentiation at the lower end of the uncertainty–certainty continuum posed problems for these age groups. The observation of an adult confederate modeling appropriate metamemory monitoring did not improve children’s metacognitive performance.

How to improve argumentation comprehension in university students: experimental test of a training approach

Instructional Science - The ability to comprehend informal arguments is essential for scientific literacy but students often lack structural knowledge about these arguments, especially when the...     

Producing Knowledge for Living

Work is still associated predominantly with employment. A lot of studies focus on the link between learning and labour, but there are few investigations of what kind of knowledge is produced in the act of creating and sustaining life. This is not surprising as subsistence production is not valued as much as work that generates profits. The daily backbreaking work of poor people and women is best captured from the perspective of livelihood systems. These are constantly adjusted and they vary from one person, household or community to another. Working knowledge defined in terms of livelihood activities includes knowing how local hierarchies are tied up in larger socio-political structures, how indigenous herbs can be used for healing, and how communal resources should best be managed so that they serve the interests of all. The paper uses a case study from a village in Zimbabwe to illustrate how the collective actions of a community resulted in learning that led to the rehabilitation of a community dam and a plan for sustainable management of this asset. In this way, villagers could diversify their activities, and thus become less vulnerable to hazards such as drought. The paper suggests that educators have a role in helping villagers to ask the right questions in the process of making really useful knowledge for living.     

Print exposure across the reading life span

Reading and Writing - Leisure reading is a main contributor to print exposure, which is in turn related to individual differences in reading and language skills. The Author Recognition Test (ART)...