MMPCURSRT · A multi-method perspective on children's use of rehearsal in serial recall tasks

A multi-method perspective on children's use of rehearsal in serial recall tasks

In a changing society, schools not only have the task of teaching knowledge, but also have to prepare students for life-long learning. Therefore, education increasingly aims to foster Self-Regulated Learning. For self-regulated learning students need various competencies: a large set of strategies appropriate for different cognitive tasks, metacognition to regulate the targeted use of appropriate strategies as well as motivation and volition to stay engaged in the learning tasks. Even though research into self-regulated learning has grown in the last 25 years, several key issues have not been solved yet. However, these can be studied by combining methods from cognitive and from developmental psychology with state-of-the-art statistical modelling. One issue is that high-quality multi-method research into strategy development and metacognitive development is very scarce, particular in the elementary school years. From a scientific perspective this research is crucial, because all methods to assess cognitive strategies have their specific strengths and weaknesses. Only if different methods lead to the same or similar conclusions can we gain reliable, cross-validated knowledge about strategy use and development. Only with multi-method research can we learn how well children’s metacognitive skills to accurately report their cognitive strategy have developed. In addition to children’s self-reports about strategy use, we therefore need further methods to check the accuracy of these self-reports. From a societal perspective this research is crucial, because the competencies for self-regulated learning are starting to develop throughout the primary school years. Teachers trying to foster self-regulated learning in their day-to-day work, as well as researchers developing interventions, need reliable knowledge about strategies and metacognitive development. The present project therefore examined questions of the development of strategy use, strategy adaptation to task characteristics and metacognitive insights into strategy use within the area of memory strategies. The objectives of the project were to move research into strategy development and metacognitive development forward by (a) gathering high-quality data in an experimentally well controlled manner by using individualized testing (b) … with an integrated multi-method design to combine data from complementary sources (c) … in a sample large enough to provide good statistical power (d) and to analyse the data with novel statistical modelling techniques that are most appropriate for the data structure and the research questions.

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