Childrens’s beliefs about everyday reasoning

Two studies investigated children’s metacognition about everyday reasoning, assessing how they distinguish reasoning from nonreasoning and ‘‘good’ ’ reasoning from ‘‘bad.’ ’ In Study 1, 80 1st graders (6 – 7 years), 3rd graders (8 – 9 years), 5th graders (10 – 11 years), and adults (181 years) evaluated scenarios where people (a) used reasoning, (b) solved problems with nonreasoning approaches, or (c) reacted appropriately but auto-matically to events. All age groups distinguished reasoning from type (b) nonreasoning cases, but age-related improvement occurred for type (c) cases. Study 2 tested 160 1st, 3rd, 5th graders ’ and adults ’ evaluation of good and bad reasoning processes, finding 2 developmental changes: initial improvement in discriminating thinking processes by 3rd grade, and emergence of an adult-like, process-focused (vs. outcome-focused) concept of thinking quality by 5th grade. Children’s progress toward more sophisticated un-derstandings of the thinking mind is described by a large and varied literature that includes research on children’s early ‘‘theories of mind’ ’ (Flavell & Miller, 1998; Wellman, 2002), their beliefs about the nature and sources of knowledge, or epistemology (Mont