Metacognitive Development and Conceptual Change in Children

There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children (c. 8-12 years) acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically.