Metacognitive use of biological knowledge in Elementary School

This study is ground on the assumption that children not only appropriate content knowledge in school but internalize a model of how knowledge is queried and built. The instructional setting communicates this model even without deliberate intervention. We have carried out an investigation by submitting a written questionnaire to the pupils of a small sample of 4th and 5th grade classes that were characterized by different learning environments: traditional, inquiry oriented, inquiry and communication oriented. We focus here on children's performance in a thought experiment that was included in the questionnaire. The task consisted in predicting the kind of information about an unknown animal that different sources of information (long-term vs short-term observation, books, local people) can possibly provide.