The study compared the declarative metacognitive knowledge of 22 gifted and 40 general cohort kindergarten and first grade children. Children were given a metacognitive interview questionnaire examining their understanding of variables related to memory and attention. Gifted children were superior to the general cohort for only 18% of the memory and 12% of the attention questions. Collapsing across all the questions, however, the gifted showed significantly higher general metacognitive knowledge. Greater metacognitive knowledge in gifted children emerges by early elementary school, particularly for metacognitive attributions.
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