Self-Regulation and Metacognition

On the dramatistic cognitive development of children through internalized interaction—from Micahel Tomasello's The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition ("Discourse and Representational Redescription - Metacognition and Representational Redescription, pp. 191-94)

Around the world children five to seven years of age are seen as entering a new phase of development. Virtually all societies in which there is formal schooling begin at this age, and quite often children are given new responsibilities (Cole and Cole, 1996). At least part of the reason for adults' newfound confidence in children's growing ability to internalize various kinds of rules that adults give them and to follow them even in the absence of the rule-making adult, that is, their growing ability to self-regulate. Another reason is that children of this age are able to talk about their own reasoning and problem-solving activities in a way that makes them much more easily educable in many problem-solving activities; that is to say, they are capable of certain kinds of especially useful metacognition.

Without going into a full review of a very large develpmental and educational literature, the following are some major domains of metacognitive activity in which children begin to engage at the end of the early childhood period:

- They begin to be able to learn and to follow specific rules that adults have taught them to help in solving an intellectual problem, and they do this in a relatively independent (self-regulated) manner (Brown and AKane, 1988, Zelazo, in press).

- They begin to be able to use social and moral rules in a self-regulating manner to inhibit their behavior, to guide their social interactionsand to plan for future activities (Palincsar and Brown 1984; Gauvain and Rogoff, 1989).

- They begin to actively monitor the social impression they are making on other people and so to engage in active impression-management activities reflecting their understanding of others' views of them (Harter, 1983).

- They begin to understand and use embedded mental-state language such as "She thinks that I think X" (Perner, 1988).

- They begin to show skills of meta-memory that enable them to formulate planful strategies in memory tasks that, for example, require them to use mnemonic aids (Schneider and Bjorkland, 1997).

- They begin to display literacy skills that depend to a large extend on meta-linguistic skills that allow them to talk about language and how it works (Snow and Ninio, 1986).

Although there is not as much direct evidence as one would like, there is some evidence that these kinds of self-regulatory and metacognitive skills are related to adults using reflective metadiscourse with children—with the children then internalizing this discourse for use in regulating their own behavior independently. The idea is that as the adult regulates the child's behavior in some cognitive task or behavior, the child attempts to comprehen that regulation from the adult's point of view (to simulate the adult's perspective). And then, in many cases, the child later reenacts tha adult's instructions overtly in regulating her own behavior in that same or a similar situation in various kinds of performance monitoring, metacognitive strategies, or self-regulating speech.

There are several kinds of evidence supporting this view. First, in a series of classic studies Luria (1961) found that two- and three-year-old children were not able to use speech to regulate their problem-solving activities, as demonstrated by their repreated disregard of their own self-directed speech (they were just mimicking adult speech). But from around their fourth or fifth birthdays the children in Luria's studies did demonstrate an ability to use their speech to actually regulate their own behavior by coordinating their self-regulating sppech with their task behavior in a dialogic manner. Second, several studeis have found evidence that children's self-regulating sppech does indeed derive from adults' regulating and instructional speech specifically. Ratner and Hill (1991), for example, found that children of this age are able to reproduce the instructor's role in a teaching situation weeks after the original pedagogy (see also Foley and Ratner, 1997). There is also evidence of a correlation between instructor and learner behavior that suggests this same conclusion. For example, Kontos (1983) fournd that children who were instructed in a problem by their mothers showed increases in the amount of self-regulating sppech in their subsequent individual problem solving (relative to children who were not instructed). And there is even some experimental evidence that manipulating the style of adult instruction may lead to changes in the amounts of self-regulating speech that children use in their subsequent individual attempts in the same problem situation (Goudena, 1987). Third, it is also interesting that it is during this same age range that informal observations reveal children first showing evidence of spontaneous efforts to teach or regulate the learning of other children, behaviors of relevance here because self-regulation is, in a sense, teaching oneself (see also Ashley and Tomasello, 1998).

Children thus show relatively clear evidence of internalizing adults' regulating speech, rules, and instructions as they are reaching the later stages of the early childhood period. What is internalized is, as Vygotsky emphasized, a dialogue. In the learning interaction the child comprehends the adult instruction (simulates the adult's regulating activity), but she does so in relation to her own understanding—which requires a coordinating of the two perspectives. The cognitive representation that results, therefore, is a representation not just of the instructions but of the intersubjective dialogue (Fernyhough, 1996). One hypothesis is that the adult regulations that are most likely to be appropriated by the child into an internal dialogue are those that come at difficult points in the task, that is, when the child and adult are not both focused on the same aspect of the task (just as happens with other types of imitation). This discrepancy becomes apparent to the child through her attempts to reinstate a common understanding takes the form of a dialogue—either acted out or internalized. At least some evidence for this hypothesis is provided by the finding that self-regulating speech is indeed used most often by children at difficult points in problem-solving tasks (Goodman, 1984). It should also be stressed that what children internalize in the case of instruction and regulation is perhaps best thought of as the "voice" of another person (Bakhtin, 1981; Wertsch, 1991)—the important point being that a voice is more than a bloodless point of view, but rather actually directs the child's cognition or behavior with more or less authority. Internalizing an instructional directive from an adult thus includes both a conceptual perspective and a moral injunction: "You should look at it in this way." Bruner (1993, 1996), in particular, has been insistent that to give a full accounting of human culture we must not overlook this "deontic" dimension of culture and cultural learning.

 

 

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