ABSTRACT
Metacognitive abilities in children appear to start to develop at an early age, though there is variation in the age at which different abilities appear. Early studies within the memory domain, for example, found that young children do recognize that an instruction to remember requires a special effort, but until around 7 years of age, they do not come up with especially effective strategies (Appel et aI., 1972; Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966; Garrity, 1975). Preschoolers are aware of the increased difficulty of remembering items over longer time periods, but not until around age 8 do they implement longer study times in response to longer retention intervals (Rogoff, Newcombe, & Kagan, 1974), leading to a decrease in errors. Similarly, though young children can distinguish between difficult and easy items to remember, unlike older children, they do not allocate more study time to these items (Dufresne & Kobasigawa, 1989).
