Children's strategic regulation, metacognitive monitoring, and control processes during test taking

From the perspective of self-regulated learning, the interplay between learners' individual characteristics and the context of testing have been emphasized for assessing learning outcomes.

The present study examined metacognitive processes in children's test-taking behaviour and explored their impacts on performance. Further, it was investigated whether differences in retrieval processes (operationalized through item difficulty) contribute to performance in strategic regulation skills.

A total of 107 participants (8-/9- and 11-/12-year-olds) solved a cloze test including answerable (easy, medium, and difficult questions) and unanswerable questions about an earlier presented educational film, gave confidence judgments to every answer, and were then allowed to withdraw answers if they wished. Two different scoring schemes for test performance were compared to a control group.

Analyses revealed relatively adequate monitoring processes when metacognitively distinguishing easy, difficult, and unanswerable items and correct and incorrect answers. At the same time, there was developmental progression in the ability to accurately monitor uncertainty. As to control processes, all children proved to be able to adjust their test-taking behaviour to the benefit of test accuracy by withdrawing mainly incorrect answers. Controlling was more efficient for easy than for difficult and unanswerable items.

The study offers evidence for the impact of metacognitive skills in children's learning outcomes and documents strategic behaviour during test taking, as well as developmental progression in the involved skills. Further, findings underline the importance of memory retrieval for subsequent metacognitive processes.