Metacognition in a diverse nursery school in East London

Last year, I read an article outlining the work that Helen Lewis had done around metacognition with young children. Lewis’s study followed a group of four- to six-year-olds in Welsh primary schools over the course of a year (2018, 2017). She employed a range of strategies in order to determine whether or not the children could think metacognitively, including video-stimulated reflective dialogue (VSRD), observations of children engaged in play, drawings by the children and peer discussions. What struck me upon reading Lewis’s article was the very interesting question that it opened with – can young children think metacognitively at all? I was inspired to sift through the literature on metacognition, discovering that a lot more research has been invested in the upper key stages. My own secondary peers were surprised when I mentioned that children in the Early Years could adopt the ‘plan, monitor and evaluate’ model. I decided, therefore, to try to replicate Lewis’s study