Repeated Feedback Can Benefit Seven-Year-old's Uncertainty Monitoring in a Memory Task.

Children's ability to accurately monitor their performance is crucial for self-regulated learning and academic achievement, but interventions are rare. We aimed to improve young primary school childrens' (N = 127; M = 7.45 years) uncertainty monitoring with feedback. Participants attended six training sessions in which they received either metacognitive feedback, performance feedback or were assigned to an active control group. In the metacognitive feedback group, children received feedback on the correspondence between their accuracy in a memory task and their uncertainty monitoring (confidence judgments). In the performance feedback group, children received solely feedback on their accuracy in a memory task. In the active control group, children solved attention control tasks. Pre- and post-training, we assessed participants' memory performance in a recognition test and uncertainty monitoring with confidence judgments. Results revealed that metacognitive, but not performance feedback, improved children's uncertainty monitoring from pre- to posttest. However, metacognitive and performance feedback did not improve memory accuracy. The number of required sessions and items per session might be one of the most important aspects to be clarified in future studies.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41465-025-00322-8.