The relation between intellectual and metacognitive skills from a developmental perspective

The first objective of this study was to establish to what extent metacognitive skill development is associated with intelligence. As a second objective, the generality vs. domain-specificity of maturing metacognitive skills was investigated. Both issues have major implications for the training and transferability of metacognitive skills. Participants from four age groups (fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-graders, and university students) performed four inductive learning tasks, representing different domains. Intelligence, metacognitive skillfulness and learning performances were assessed for each participant. Results show that metacognitive skillfulness is a general, person-related characteristic across age groups, rather than being domain-specific. Moreover, metacognitive skills appear to develop and to contribute to learning performance, partly independent of intelligence. Educational implications are discussed.