Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metacognition is important for decision making, problem solving and learning. Despite the widespread interest inmetacognitive skills and their development, it is challenging to measure metacognitive skills in children. Some excellent quali-tative and observational measures exist, but use metrics that are different from traditional metacognition tasks for adults. Somemeta-cognition tasks of memory have been developed for children, but these only offer a narrow range of the skills involvedin metacognition. Here, we compared performance on a meta-memory task for children with a new task of metacognitionfor problem solving. Our sample includes about 800 children aged 8-10 years who were part of a larger study exploring thedevelopment of thinking skills. The results indicated similarities and differences between the memory and problem solvingtasks, suggesting that the new task could be a bridge between existing qualitative and quantitative measures of metacognitionin children.