Domain-specific and domain-general metacognition for strategy selection in children with learning disabilities

How specific learning disabilities (SLD) affect metacognition in children? Given the importance of metacognition for cognitive growth during childhood, we aimed at determining whether metacognitive development in children with SLD undergo a shift from domain-specific to domain-general, as found during typical development. Children with SLD (N = 39; 20 females) and matched controls (N = 78; 40 females) aged between 10 and 14 (mean age = 12.2 years; mean parental education = 12.8 years) had to select the better strategy on each item in memory and arithmetic problem-solving tasks. Strategy use and judgments of confidence were assessed on each trial for each individual. We found that both children with SLD and controls had scores higher than chance when judging whether they selected the better strategy on a given item in both the arithmetic and the memory domains. Moreover, children with SLD were less accurate than controls when making their judgments. Furthermore, while our data showed a pattern consistent with domain-general metacognition in the control group, metacognition is bounded by task content in the SLD group. Implications of these findings to further our understanding of differences in metacognition between typically developing children and children with specific learning disabilities are discussed.