Developing Metacognition of 5- to 6-Year-Old Children: Evaluating the Effect of a Circling Curriculum Based on Anji Play

Metacognition plays an important role in young children's learning and daily life activities. Based on Anji Play, we designed a metacognition enhancement program named Circling Curriculum for Metacognition Training (CCMT). With a quasi-experimental design, we examined the effects of the CCMT program on the metacognition of 5-6 year old Chinese children. Two classes of 5-6 year old children were randomly assigned into an experimental group (n = 25, 10 girls, mean age = 65.92 months, SD = 3.58) and a control group (n = 22, 10 girls, mean age = 66.77, SD = 3.87). The experimental group received the three-month CCMT, while the control group received routine teaching activities without imposing any interventions. All children took the metacognition test before and after the intervention. Results indicated that (1) there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in all dimensions of metacognitive ability in the pre-test; (2) the experimental group exhibited better metacognitive ability than the control group in most dimensions of metacognitive ability in the post-test; and (3) the gain scores in the metacognitive ability of experimental group were significantly higher than those of the control group. The results are very encouraging and suggest that CCMT can foster the development of the metacognitive ability of young children.