Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Historically, research on the development of metacognition, that is, knowledge about cognition, dates back to the work of Jean Piaget and his claim that young children do not know that there are such things as conceptual, perceptual, and emotional perspectives of points of view. Piaget and his colleagues used the concept of egocentrism to interpret the findings of their developmental studies on a wide variety of social-cognitive topics such as perceptual perspective taking, and understanding of thoughts, dreams, or intentions. Although there is broad agreement today that young children are not as egocentric as Piaget believed them to be, his claim that perspective-taking abilities and related psychological knowledge develop quickly over time has been confirmed in numerous studies (see Flavell, 2000).
A second line of research on metacognitive development was initiated in the early 1970s by Brown, Flavell, and their colleagues (for reviews, see Brown et al., 1983; Flavell, Miller, and Miller, 1993). At the very beginning, research focused on knowledge about memory, which was coined “metamemory” by Flavell (1971). Later on, the concept was broadened and termed “metacognition” (Flavell, 1979). Metacognition was defined as any knowledge or cognitive activity that takes as its cognitive object, or that regulates, any aspect of any cognitive activity (Flavell et al., 1993, p. 150). Obviously, this is a very broad conceptualization that includes people's knowledge of their own information-processing skills, as well as knowledge about the nature of cognitive tasks, and about strategies for coping with such tasks.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.