Dissertation

Metacognitive processes underlying psychomotor performance in children identified as high skilled, average, and having developmental coordination disorder (DCD)

Martini, Rose

2002

Overview

Metacognition is the monitoring, evaluating, and correction of one's own performance while engaged in an intellectual task. It has been explored within educational psychology in various cognitive and academic domains, for example, general problem solving, physics, reading, writing, and mathematics, and with different populations including children who are gifted, children who have learning disabilities, as well as children who have intellectual delays. Research in these areas has demonstrated that the use of metacognition differs with different levels of ability. Metacognition has rarely been mentioned in the psychomotor literature. It is not known whether children of different psychomotor abilities use metacognition differently. This study used a think-aloud protocol to compare the active use of metacognition in children with different psychomotor abilities—high skill (N = 8), average (N = 9), developmental coordination disorder (DCD) (N = 5)—during a novel motor task. Children with DCD did not verbalize fewer or different metacognitive concepts than either the average or high skill children, however, relative to their counterparts, a significant proportion of the concepts verbalized by children with DCD were found to be inappropriate or inaccurate. These findings reflect ineffective metacognitive processing by children with DCD during a psychomotor task. In general, the results of this study parallel those found in the cognitive domain. This study showed that children with differing psychomotor abilities also demonstrated differences in use of metacognition.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Cognitive psychology / Cognitive therapy / Educational psychology / Physical education / Physiological psychology
• ISBN: 0612857255, 9780612857254