Metacognition

The purpose of this research study was to determine K-12 school leaders' concepts of ability and technology readiness. The Theories of Intelligence Scale (TIS) was used to analyze concepts of ability and the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) 2.0 was used to analyze the technology readiness of K-12 school leaders. Data from the two instruments were used to determine if there was any relationship between K-12 school leaders' concept of ability and technology readiness. This analysis filled a blank spot in the research contributing to the literature on leadership, Mindset Theory (Dweck, 2006; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995), and Technology Readiness (Lin & Hsieh, 2012; Parasuraman, 2000). Furthermore it helped to determine the state of K-12 school leaders' status as 21st century leaders. The sample consisted of the school leaders of School District of Palm Beach County (SDPBC). This included 158 principals from 104 elementary, 31 middle, and 23 high schools. The researcher was a school district employee and therefore had access to the participants. Each of the four null hypotheses were rejected as SDPBC school leaders scored significantly higher on the TIS (p < .05) and TRI 2.0 (p < .01), there was a significant (p < .0125) positive relationship between TIS and the TRI 2.0, and that relationship was affected (p < .05) by gender, race, and experience.

The current study assessed whether the accuracy of children’s self-reports of
events experienced differs as a function of age and how the question is asked. Additional
factors like metamemory and distractibility were assessed. Primary-school students (M=
7.7 years) and middle-school students (M = 9.7 years) completed two different versions
of an event frequency measure, two times, at one week intervals. In one of the measures
of event frequency, no memory prompts were provided (uncued questionnaire condition),
while in the other measure, recall categories for aiding recollections were provided (cued
questionnaire condition). Participants’ self-reported event frequencies for the cued and
uncued questionnaires were compared with trained observers’ event frequencies for the
cued and uncued conditions. Older children reported event frequency more accurately
than younger participants. Participants also reported events with greater accuracy with
the aid of memory prompts than without, an effect that was especially strong among the
younger children. Neither metamemory nor distractibility was accountable for the differences within age groups. The findings suggest that age-related improvements in
accuracy of event frequency across the transition into adolescence may, in part, be due to
improvements in the ability to recall and recount those events in the absence of memory
cues.

Prospective memory is remembering to perform an action in the future, such as attending a meeting (a time-based task) or picking up milk at the gas station (an eventbased task), and is crucial to achieving goal-directed activities in everyday life. Children who fail to develop prospective memory abilities are likely to experience difficulties interacting with parents, teachers, and peers. To date, research on prospective memory development has been primarily descriptive or focused on underlying executive functioning. This dissertation investigated the developmental relationship between metacognitive representation and prospective memory in preschool and elementary school children and adults. Findings from Study 1 indicated that individual differences in representational ability independently predicted individual differences in 3-year-olds' performance on event-based tasks that are of low-interest. Qualitative changes are important to consider when modeling prospective memory develop ment, as with episodic memory. Study 2 presents findings based on a study using the CyberCruiser 2.0, an Xbox-style racing game designed to assess time-based prospective memory. This study confirmed that kindergarten children are capable of completing this time-based prospective memory task but revealed that performance improved with age. Between kindergarten and 2nd grade, children become better aware of their own mental processes and abilities, allowing them to adjust their strategies and perform more comparable to adults. As a result, in this study, younger children tended to overestimate their prospective memory abilities and were less likely to monitor passing time, causing them to fail more time-based task trials than older children and adults.