MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION
The Development of
Metacognitive Knowledge in
Children and Adolescents:
Major Trends and Implications
for Education
Wolfgang Schneider1
ABSTRACT—This article gives an overview of developmen-
tal trends in research on metacognition in children and
adolescents. Whereas a first wave of studies focused on the
assessment of declarative and procedural metacognitive
knowledge in schoolchildren and adolescents, a second wave
focused on very young children’s “theory of mind” (ToM).
Findings from a recent longitudinal study are presented that
demonstrate developmental links between early ToM and
subsequent declarative metacognitive knowledge, mainly
mediated by language competencies. The relevant literature
further indicates that developmental trends in declarative
and procedural metacognitive knowledge clearly differ.
Whereas the findings for declarative metacognitive knowl-
edge show steady improvement through childhood and
adolescence, mainly due to increases in knowledge about
strategies, the results are not similarly clear-cut for procedur-
al metacognition. Age trends observed for this component of
metacognition are significant for self-control activities but
not pronounced for monitoring abilities. These findings have
important implications for education, emphasizing the role of
strategy training procedures in different instructional
domains and illustrating teachers’ potential impact on the
improvement of monitoring and control processes.
1
Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg
Address correspondence to Wolfgang Schneider, Department of
Psychology, University of Würzburg, Wittelsbacher Platz 1, 97074
Würzburg, Germany; e-mail: schneider@psychologie.uni-wurzburg.de
© 2008 the Author
114 Journal Compilation © 2008 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
INTRODUCTION
Research on metacognitive development was initiated in the
early 1970s by Ann Brown, John Flavell, and their colleagues
(for reviews, see Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione,
1983; Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993; Schneider & Pressley,
1997). From the very beginning, metacognition was broadly
defined as any knowledge or cognitive activity that takes as
its cognitive object, or that regulates, any aspect of any cogni-
tive activity (Flavell et al., 1993, p. 150). Obviously, this con-
ceptualization refers to 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. Moreover, it also includes executive skills related
to monitoring and self-regulation of one’s own cognitive
activities. In a seminal article, Flavell (1979) described three
major facets of metacognition, namely metacognitive knowl-
edge, metacognitive experiences, and metacognitive skills,
that is, strategies controlling cognition.
This theoretical framework of metacognition was sub-
sequently extended by Pressley, Borkowski, and Schneider
(1989), who proposed an elaborate model of metacognition,
the Good Information Processing Model, that not only con-
sidered aspects of procedural and declarative metacognitive
knowledge but also linked these concepts to other features of
successful information processing. According to this model,
sophisticated metacognition is closely related to the learner’s
strategy use, motivational orientation, general knowledge
about the world, and automated use of efficient learning pro-
cedures. All these components are assumed to interact. For
instance, specific strategy knowledge influences the adequate
application of metacognitive strategies, which in turn affects
Volume 2—Number 3
 Wolfgang Schneider
knowledge. As the strategies are carried out, they are moni-
tored and evaluated, which leads to expansion and refinement
of specific strategy knowledge.
More recent conceptualizations of metacognition added
components such as self-regulation skills (e.g., Efklides, 2001;
Schunk & Zimmerman, 1998). Whereas the concept of meta-
cognition was first developed in the context of developmental
research, it is now widely used in different areas of psychology,
including motivation research and clinical and educational
psychology. Recent developments also include cognitive neu-
roscience models of metacognition (cf. Shimamura, 2000).
Its popularity is mainly due to the fact that metacognition is
crucial for concepts of everyday reasoning and those assessing
scientific thinking as well as social interactions. An influential
recent research paradigm has aimed at understanding metacog-
nitive processes in their developmental dimension, trying to link
young children’s “theory of mind” (ToM) with their subsequent
metacognitive developments. The most important outcomes of
this approach will be described in some detail, followed by a
brief summary of developmental trends observed in the area of
metacognition. Finally, implications of metacognitive develop-
ment for education will be considered in more detail.
Assessment of Children’s ToM
In the early 1980s, a second wave of studies focused on young
children’s knowledge about the mental world, better known
as ToM research. This wave is still very much in motion and
may have produced more than 1,000 publications within the
past 25 years or so. It deals with very young children’s under-
standing of mental life and age-related changes in this under-
standing, for instance, their knowledge that mental
representations of events need not correspond to reality (cf.
Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1985). ToM refers to the ability to esti-
mate mental states, such as beliefs, desires, or intentions, and
to predict other people’s performance based on judgments of
their mental states (see also Kloo & Perner, this volume). One
of the major and consistent outcomes of numerous ToM studies
has been that significant changes in children’s ability to take
over the perspective of other people occur between 3 and 4
years of age. Whereas 3-year-olds find it impossible to believe
that another person could hold an assertation that the child
knows to be false, most 4-year-olds come to recognize asserta-
tions as the expression of someone’s belief that is not necessar-
ily true. Explanations of this rapid change in children’s ToM
were linked to developmental changes in functions of the pre-
frontal cortex, in particular, inhibitory functions and those
concerned with the regulation of behavior.
Differences Between the Metacognitive and the
ToM Approach
Interestingly, research on metacognition and ToM has
not been systematically related in the past, even though
researchers in both traditions share the same general objec-
Volume 2—Number 3
tive, that is, exploring children’s knowledge about and under-
standing of mental phenomena. As noted by Flavell (2000)
and Kuhn (1999, 2000), there are several differences between
the two research paradigms that may have contributed to the
fact that the research literatures have been distinct and
unconnected. For instance, whereas ToM researchers have
investigated children’s initial knowledge about the existence
of various mental states such as desires and intentions, meta-
cognitive researchers have focused more on task-related men-
tal processes such as strategies for improving performance on
various tasks or attempts to monitor improvements. Flavell
(2000) conceived of this approach as “problem centered” and
suggested that it may be labeled “applied ToM.”
A second distinction between the two research paradigms
concerns the age groups under study. Because ToM research-
ers are mainly interested in the origins of knowledge about
mental states, they predominantly study infants and young
children. On the other hand, metacognitive researchers inves-
tigate knowledge components and skills that already require
some understanding of mental states and thus mainly test older
children and adolescents. A further distinction concerns the fact
that developmental research on metacognition deals with what
a child knows about his or her own mind rather than somebody
else’s. As noted by Flavell (2000), how and how often other peo-
ple use their minds in similar situations are not of primary inter-
est. In contrast, it is an individual’s understanding of some other
person’s mind that is usually of central concern in ToM studies.
Clarification of the terminology issue seems important.
Figure 1 contains an overview of the various theoretical per-
spectives on metacognitive knowledge popular in the field of
developmental psychology, making links between the various
taxonomies and the terminologies that were used by different
research lines. It should be noted that conceptualizations of
metacognitive knowledge in other fields of psychology such as
gerontology and general cognitive psychology are narrower in
scope. For example, several questionnaires assessing declarative
metamemory in adults and the elderly focus on participants’
beliefs about their memory and thus restrict the concept to the
person variable of Flavell and Wellman’s (1977) taxonomy (e.g.,
Dixon & Hertzog, 1988; Herrmann, 1982). In contrast, concep-
tualizations of metamemory in the field of cognitive psychol-
ogy almost exclusively elaborate on the procedural knowledge
component (e.g., Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994; Nelson, 1996;
Nelson & Narens, 1990, 1994). In fact, as noted by Joyner and
Kurtz-Costes (1997), most of the current work on metamem-
ory comes from cognitive psychologists who focus on monitor-
ing and self-regulation processes in adults. As a consequence,
research trying to link ToM development and the development
of metacognition is still scarce. In the following, recent longi-
tudinal evidence carried out in our lab and testing the assump-
tion of developmental links between ToM and metacognitive
knowledge will be briefly summarized (for more details, see
Lockl & Schneider, 2006, 2007).
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 Metacognitive Knowledge in Children and Adolescents
Metacognition (Knowledge about cognition)
“Meta-Knowing” (Kuhn, 2000)
Knowledge about the mental world Knowledge about memory (Metamemory, Flavell, 1971)
“Metacognitive Knowing” (Kuhn, 2000)
“Theory-of-mind”-research
Declarative metamemory
“variables” category
• understanding of false belief (Flavell & Wellman, 1977)
• understanding of mental states such as • knowledge about
desires, emotions, attention, person, task, and
consciousness etc. strategy variables
• understanding of mental verbs • understanding of
mental verbs
Fig. 1. Taxonomy of metacognition components (slightly modified after Schneider & Lockl, in press).
Links Between ToM and Metacognitive Knowledge
Our longitudinal study started with 174 children (who were
about 3 years of age at the beginning) and investigated the
relationship between early ToM and subsequent metamem-
ory development while simultaneously taking into account
the possible mediating role of language development. Children
were tested at four measurement points, separated by a test-
ing interval of approximately half a year. Whereas the main
goal was to combine aspects of research on ToM and metam-
emory within a longitudinal framework, a second goal was to
examine the role of language abilities in the emergence of
ToM and metacognitive competencies.
There were several interesting findings. First of all, we
demonstrated rapid improvements in both language compe-
tencies and children’s ToM over the age period under study,
thus confirming previous longitudinal research on this issue
(see Astington & Jenkins, 1999; Schneider, Perner, Bullock,
Stefanek, & Ziegler, 1999). Second, we were able to show that
the stability of the ToM construct was only moderate at
the beginning but increased subsequently, reaching levels of
stability similar to those found for the language tests. This
finding clearly points to a continuity in ToM development.
Furthermore, several outcomes addressing the impact of
language on ToM and metamemory development seem nota-
ble. Findings demonstrated a strong relationship between
language and ToM, thus confirming results of previous stud-
ies (e.g., Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002). Moreover, signifi-
116
“Metastrategic Knowing” (Kuhn, 2000)
Procedural metamemory
“sensitivity” category
(Flavell & Wellman, 1977)
monitoring component control and self-regulation
(Nelson & Narens, 1990, 1994) component (Nelson &
Narens, 1990, 1994)
• ease-of-learning (EOL)
judgments • knowledge of recall
• judgments of learning (JOL) readiness
• feeling-of-knowing (FOK) • allocation of study time
cant relationships between language and metamemory could
be shown. That is, language abilities assessed at the ages of
3 and 4 made significant contributions to the prediction of
metamemory scores at the age of 5. Finally, it was shown that
ToM obviously facilitated the acquisition of metacognitive
knowledge. Whereas the amount of variance in metamem-
ory scores at the age of 5 explained by ToM at the age of 3
was relatively small, this proportion increased considerably
when ToM scores assessed at age 4 were used as predic-
tors. Early ToM competencies also affected the acquisition
of metacognitive vocabulary (e.g., knowledge about mental
words such as guessing or knowing), which in turn had an
impact on developmental changes in metacognitive knowl-
edge. Obviously, advanced ToM development is character-
ized by a growing insight into inferential and interpretive
mental processes (Sodian, 2005). Overall, we demonstrated
that children who acquired a ToM early also showed bet-
ter metamemory performance assessed about 2 years later.
These findings support the hypothesis that early ToM com-
petencies can be considered as a precursor of subsequent
metamemory.
Metacognitive Development in
Childhood and Adolescence
In general, children’s declarative metamemory increases
with age and is correlated with age-related improvements in
Volume 2—Number 3
 Wolfgang Schneider
memory behavior (see Schneider & Lockl, 2002; Schneider
& Pressley, 1997, for reviews). We know from various inter-
view studies that knowledge about memory-relevant knowl-
edge concerning person, task, and strategy variables develops
significantly from the early elementary school period on and
does not reach its peak before young adulthood (cf. Schneider &
Pressley, 1997). For instance, factual knowledge about the
importance of task characteristics and memory strategies
develops rapidly once children enter school. Knowledge
about the usefulness of memory strategies was tapped in
several studies that focused on organizational strategies
(e.g., Justice, 1985; Schneider, 1986; Sodian, Schneider, &
Perlmutter, 1986). As a main result, these studies reported a
major shift in strategy knowledge between kindergarten and
grade 6.
Similar age trends were observed when the interaction of
memory variables was considered. For example, Wellman
(1978) presented memory problems to 5- and 10-year-olds.
Each problem consisted of ranking three picture cards, each
of which contained a memorizing scenario. For instance,
one set consisted of pictures of three boys, each of whom
was supposed to remember a certain number of items (3, 9,
or 18 items). This was a simple problem tapping a single task
variable. A more complicated interaction problem (Item
× Strategy) required judgments considering at least two
aspects of the task (number of items and memory behavior).
Whereas all the children solved the simple memory prob-
lem, substantial developmental differences were found for
more complex memory problems that required the under-
standing of interaction effects between task difficult and
strategy efficiency. The latter was solved by almost all the
schoolchildren but only by a small proportion of the kin-
dergarteners. More recent findings indicate that knowledge
about the interaction of memory variables develops rather
slowly continuing well into adolescence (cf. Schneider &
Lockl, 2002).
Taken together, the empirical evidence illustrates that
some declarative metamemory is already there in preschool
children and develops steadily over the elementary school
years. Knowledge of most facts about memory is already
impressive by 11 or 12 years of age. Nonetheless, declarative
metamemory is not complete by the end of childhood. For
instance, several studies on knowledge about text process-
ing have shown that understanding the relative importance
of text elements and the effectiveness of different reading
strategies continues to develop, as does understanding of
task and person variable interactions that determine mem-
ory (cf. Baker & Brown, 1984; Brown et al., 1983; Schneider
& Pressley, 1997). Even adolescents and young adults lack
knowledge about some powerful and important memory
strategies when the task is to read, comprehend, and memo-
rize complex text materials (cf. Garner, 1987; Pressley &
Afflerbach, 1995).
Volume 2—Number 3
The Development of Self-Monitoring and Self-Control
According to Nelson and Narens (1990, 1994), self-monitoring
and self-regulation correspond to two different levels of meta-
cognitive processing that interact very closely. Self-monitoring
refers to keeping track of where you are with your goal of
understanding and remembering (a bottom-up process). In
comparison, self-regulation or control refers to central execu-
tive activities and includes planning, directing, and evaluating
your behavior (a top-down process).
What are the determinants of metacognitive judgments
and their accuracy? Most researchers adopt a “cue-utilization”
view, according to which metacognitive judgments are infer-
ential in nature, based on a variety of heuristics and cues that
have some degree of validity in predicting memory perform-
ance (e.g., Benjamin & Bjork, 1996; Dunlosky & Nelson,
1992; Koriat, in press). An important distinction is that
between “theory-based” and “experience-based” metacogni-
tive judgments (Koriat, 1997). Whereas theory-based judg-
ments rely on the deliberate application of metacognitive
beliefs or theories about one’s competences and skills, expe-
rience-based judgments are assumed to rely on mnemonic
cues that derive from online information processing. So far,
developmental research on procedural metacognition has
hardly examined the contributions of mnemonic cues and
heuristics to children’s judgments. Given that even among
adults the contribution of one’s theories and knowledge to
monitoring and control seems to be quite limited, there is
reason to assume that children’s metacognitive judgments
are predominantly guided by online implicit utilization of
subtle experiential cues.
Monitoring Skills in Children
The most studied type of procedural metamemory is that of
self-monitoring, evaluating how well one is progressing (cf.
Borkowski, Milstead, & Hale, 1988; Brown et al., 1983;
Schneider, 1998). The developmental literature has focused
on monitoring components such as ease-of-learning (EOL)
judgments, judgments of learning (JOLs), and feeling-of-
knowing (FOK) judgments. What are the major developmen-
tal trends? In short, the findings suggest that even young
children possess monitoring skills and that developmental
trends are not entirely clear, varying as a function of the para-
digm under study. Whereas young kindergarten children
tend to overestimate their performance when EOL judgments
are considered, EOL judgments can be already accurate in
young elementary school children. When children’s postdic-
tions were assessed in children ranging between 7 and 10
years of age, rather accurate judgments were found even for
the younger age groups. However, older children performed
significantly better. In most of the relevant studies, subtle
improvements over the elementary school years were found
(cf. Schneider & Lockl, 2002, in press).
117
 Metacognitive Knowledge in Children and Adolescents
Given that only a few developmental studies focused on
JOLs occurring during or soon after the acquisition of mem-
ory materials, the situation is not yet clear. Overall, findings
support the assumption that children’s ability to judge their
own memory performance after study of test materials seems
to increase over the elementary school years. However, even
young children are able to monitor their performance quite
accurately when judgments are not given immediately after
study but are somewhat delayed.
A number of studies have explored children’s FOK judg-
ments and accuracy (e.g., Cultice, Somerville, & Wellman,
1983; DeLoache & Brown, 1984). FOK judgments occur either
during or after a learning procedure and are judgments about
whether a currently unrecallable item will be remembered at
a subsequent retention test. Typically, children are shown a
series of items and asked to name them. When children can-
not recall the name of an object given its picture, they are
asked to indicate whether the name could be recognized if the
experimenter provided it. These FOK ratings are then related
to subsequent performance on the recognition test. Overall,
most of the available evidence on FOK judgments suggests
that FOK accuracy improves continuously across childhood
and adolescence (e.g., Wellman, 1977; Zabrucky & Ratner,
1986). Again, however, the pattern of developmental trends
is not entirely clear. In a study that avoided a methodological
problem apparent in previous research on FOK judgments,
Butterfield, Nelson, and Peck (1988) showed that 6-year-olds’
FOK judgments were actually more accurate than those of
10- and 18-year-olds. Obviously, this finding did not square well
with the results of previous research. A more recent study
by Lockl and Schneider (2002) using the same experimen-
tal paradigm could not replicate the outcomes reported by
Butterfield et al. but was more in accord with the older find-
ings described above. Taken together, it seems fair to state
that more recent studies assessing monitoring abilities in JOL
or FOK tasks demonstrate rather small developmental pro-
gression in children’s monitoring skills (see also Roebers, von
der Linden, Howie, & Schneider, 2007).
The Relation Between Monitoring and Control Processes in Children
An important reason to study metacognitive monitoring
processes is because monitoring is supposed to play a central
role in directing how people study. Numerous studies includ-
ing adult participants showed that individuals use memory
monitoring, especially JOLs, to decide which items to study
and how long to spend on them (e.g., Metcalfe, 2002; Nelson,
Dunlosky, Graf, & Narens, 1994; Nelson & Narens, 1990;
Son & Metcalfe, 2000). However, little is known about how
children use monitoring to regulate their study time. A classic
paradigm suited to further explore this issue refers to the allo-
cation of study time. Research on study time allocation observes
how learners deploy their attention and effort. As already
118
noted by Brown et al. (1983), the ability to attend selectively
to relevant aspects of a problem-solving task is a traditional
index of learners’ understanding of the task. Developmental
studies on the allocation of study time examined whether
schoolchildren and adults were more likely to spend
more time on less well-learned material (e.g., Dufresne &
Kobasigawa, 1989; Lockl & Schneider, 2004; Masur,
McIntyre, & Flavell, 1973). All these studies reported an age-
related improvement in the efficient allocation of study time.
That is, older children (from age 10 on) spent more time stud-
ying hard items than they spent studying easy items, despite
the fact that even many of the 6-year-old children were able
to distinguish between hard and easy pairs.
Thus, developmental differences were not so much
observed in the metacognitive knowledge itself but in its effi-
cient application to self-regulation strategies.
The Importance of Metacognition for Education
During the past 20 years or so, several attempts have been
made to apply metacognitive theory to educational settings
(cf. Moely, Santulli, & Obach, 1995; Palincsar, 1986; Paris &
Oka, 1986; Pressley, 1995; Pressley, Goodchild, Fleet, &
Zajchowski, 1989).
One interesting and effective approach to teaching knowl-
edge about strategies was developed by Palincsar and Brown
(1984). Here, teachers and students take turns executing read-
ing strategies that are being taught with instruction occurring
in true dialogue. Strategic processes are made very overt, with
plenty of exposure to modeling of strategies and opportuni-
ties to practice these techniques over the course of a number
of lessons. The goals are that children discover the utility of
reading strategies and that teachers convey strategy-utility
information as well as information about when and where to
use particular strategies. Teachers using reciprocal instruc-
tion assume more responsibility for strategy implementation
early in instruction, gradually transferring control over to the
student (see Palincsar, 1986, for an extensive description of
the implementation of reciprocal instruction; see Rosenshine &
Meister, 1994, for a realistic appraisal of its benefits).
During the 1980s and 1990s numerous studies explored
the efficiency of strategy training approaches in school (for
a review, see Schneider & Pressley, 1997). The basic assump-
tion was that, although children in most cases do not effi-
ciently monitor the effectiveness of strategies they are
using, they can be trained to do so. For instance, in a train-
ing program carried out by Ghatala, Levin, Pressley, and
Goodwin (1986), elementary school children were presented
with paired-associate learning tasks. Before studying these
lists, some children received a three-component training.
They were taught (a) to assess their performance with
different types of strategies, (b) to attribute differences in
performance to use of different strategies, and (c) to use
Volume 2—Number 3
 Wolfgang Schneider
information gained from assessment and attribution to guide
selection of the best strategy for a task. As a major result, it
was shown that even children 7–8 years of age can be taught
to monitor the relative efficacy of strategies that they are
using and to use utility information gained from monitoring
in making future strategy selections.
Another more large-scale approach concerns the imple-
mentation of comprehensive evaluation programs that aim at
assessing the systematic instruction of metacognitive knowl-
edge in schools. As emphasized by Joyner and Kurtz-Costes
(1997), both Moely and Pressley, with their colleagues, have
conducted very ambitious programs of evaluating effective
instruction in public school systems. For instance, Pressley
and colleagues found that effective teachers regularly incor-
porated strategy instruction and metacognitive information
about effective strategy selection and modification as a part
of daily instruction. It seems important to note that strategy
instruction was not carried out in isolation but integrated in
the curriculum and taught as part of language arts, mathemat-
ics, science, and social studies. In accord with the assump-
tion of the Good Information Processor Model outlined above
(cf. Pressley et al., 1989), effective teachers did not empha-
size the use of single strategies but taught the flexible use of
a range of procedures that corresponded to subject matter,
time constraints, and other task demands. On most occasions,
strategy instruction occurred in groups, with the teachers
modeling appropriate strategy use. By comparison, the work
by Moely et al. (1995) illustrated that the effective teaching
process described by Pressley and coworkers does not neces-
sarily constitute the rule and that effective teachers may repre-
sent a minority group in elementary school classrooms. Taken
together, the careful documentations of instructional proce-
dures carried out by Pressley, Moely, and their research groups
have shown that there is a lot of potential for metacognitively
guided instructional processes in children’s everyday learning.
Other researchers have focused on the relationship between
measures of metacognitive knowledge and children’s school
performance. For instance, Geary, Klosterman, and Adrales
(1990) explored the relationship between declarative metam-
emory and academic performance in second- and fourth-grad-
ers. The sample not only included normal elementary school
children but also learning disabled children. Not surpris-
ingly, Geary et al. found that fourth-graders performed better
than second-graders on the metamemory battery and that
metamemory–memory relationships increased with age, even
though the link was moderate at best. Contrary to expecta-
tions, however, children with learning disabilities did not
perform differently from academically normal children.
More recent research explores the utility of the metacogni-
tion concept in research with older children and adolescents,
assessing the predictive potential of metacognitive knowledge
and skillfulness in reading and math (e.g., Artelt, Schiefele, &
Schneider, 2002; Veenman, Kok, & Blöte, 2005; see also the
Volume 2—Number 3
contributions in Desoete & Veenman, 2006). Overall, these
studies confirm the view that metacognitive knowledge and
self-regulated, insightful use of learning strategies predict math
performance and reading comprehension in secondary school
settings even after differences in intellectual abilities have been
taken into account. They also give evidence that metacogni-
tive knowledge relevant for school-related domains can still be
effectively trained in late childhood and early adolescence.
Despite the fact that strategy instruction in classrooms is
difficult and that empirical studies are still rare, there are plenty
of good reasons to believe that the situation will improve in the
future. There are now metacognitive training programs avail-
able that provide long-term strategy instruction and promise
long-lasting success (cf. Schneider & Pressley, 1997). One
precondition for increasing the use of such metacognition-
related teaching is to increase teachers’ understanding of the
conceptual foundations of effective learning. As long as teach-
ers do not think in information-processing terms, it will be
difficult to establish progress in this field. However, recent
changes in teacher education let us believe that teachers will
understand information processing much better soon, ena-
bling them to implement strategy training programs in the
classroom that pay off for most students.
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