How metacognition can bridge the attainment gap
Teaching children metacognitive strategies can increase educational equality
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A child’s educational outcomes are linked to the family’s socioeconomic status (SES). Children from low-income families tend to be behind their wealthier peers before they start school, with poorer oral language, vocabulary, and numeracy skills. Children from low SES backgrounds can fall further behind if this gap – the attainment gap – is not addressed.
“Children from low-income families tend to be behind their wealthier peers before they start school.”
Reducing the attainment gap is extremely challenging, given the numerous contributing and overlapping factors, including insecure housing, food scarcity, and stress. This gap between children from low and high SES backgrounds is widening, creating a “ticking time bomb” for social mobility, according to the Sutton Trust, a charity dedicated to improving social mobility. In the UK the gap is further widening as the poorest children miss the most school.
A research team in France has been looking at interventions to bridge these inequalities so that all children are able to achieve their full potential. In soon-to-be-published research, they found improving children’s metacognition to be an effective means of improving equality. Metacognition – simply put, thinking about thinking – is a process that helps us learn. We use metacognition to reflect on what we have learnt, and to understand our own strengths and weaknesses. This can help us identify areas for improvement. It’s the process we use to understand why we got a maths problem wrong, for instance.
“We use metacognition to reflect on what we have learnt, and to understand our own strengths and weaknesses.”
Children from families with higher SES may have better metacognitive abilities than their peers, and in turn perform better in numeracy and oral language. Metacognition is therefore a promising target for reducing early inequalities.
Metacognitive abilities can be taught
The research team taught 172 preschoolers, aged 5 and 6, to understand their own metacognitive abilities and use metacognitive strategies. Another 172 children received no intervention. Teaching children these skills may seem difficult, but Gregoire Borst from Université Paris Cité, who supervised the work, says it’s actually “very simple”.
To start with, the children were taught about the brain. “We talked about plasticity of the brain,” Borst says. “We explained what a neuron is and what a connection between neurons is, and we explained that learning is about creating new connections, new ‘roads’ in the brain.” The children were also told that “it’s thanks to our brain that we can learn, and it’s important to know how it works to learn well.”
Next the children were taught that memory and attention are crucial in the learning process. After acquiring this basic understanding, they learnt that rather than starting a task immediately, it’s best to take time to reflect on the best way to complete it. “Before any activity, one of the key metacognitive strategies is to plan what you’re going to do. So we asked them to check whether they have all the materials needed, whether they could think of the best way to do the task,” says Borst. The children were given tasks to plan and told to monitor their strategy and reflect on the task.
In one instance, the children were asked to draw the shortest path for feeding the animals on a zoo map. During the task, experimenters asked the children which strategies they were using, to determine whether they were planning and adapting their strategies. They then looked at whether an increase in the use of metacognitive strategies improved the children’s attainment, explains Borst.
When tested several months after the intervention, the children who had been taught metacognitive strategies had progressed further in oral language and maths than those who didn’t receive the training. Children from a low-SES background benefited the most.
“Teaching children about metacognition and how to use metacognitive strategies can help address educational inequalities early on.”
This suggests that teaching children about metacognition and how to use metacognitive strategies can help address educational inequalities early on. This idea is supported by studies of older children, whose thinking skills have improved with intervention, leading to better academic results.
The next step, says Borst, is to show teachers and teacher trainers how to help children use these metacognitive strategies. “If you want to scale up, at some point you have to train the trainers,” he says. If teachers nurture metacognitive thinking skills early on, children may be more likely reach their academic potential, regardless of their backgrounds.
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