Assesing self- regulated learning and its relation to cognitive performance in early childhood education

Abstract

Assessment of cognitive skills and metacognitive self-regulated learning strategies is important in order to discover students¿ level of cognitive processing, and be able to intervene through the teaching process to mitigate any existing problems. The objective of this study was to assess the use of metacognitive, cognitive and motor strategies on a given task. A total of 68 five-year-old pupils enrolled in Early Childhood Education participated in the study. The assessment was carried out with an ad-hoc instrument based on the think-aloud technique, and having adequate reliability and validity values. Descriptive, associative and inferential analyses were performed. The results showed greater use of cognitive and motor strategies than of metacognitive strategies. A significant association was also found between the use of strategies at Complimentary Contributor Copy 14 Jesús de la Fuente, Jorge Amate and Mari Carmen González-Torres each moment of the task and final performance. Implications are discussed for the teaching of cognitive skills and meta-skills during this stage of education.