Replication Data for: Adjusting to errors in arithmetic: a longitudinal investigation of metacognitive control in 7–9-year-olds

Introduction: Monitoring and controlling one’s performance are essential skills
for children’s cognitive development and academic success. Metacognitive
control, operationalized as post-error adjustments, is, however, often measured
in conflict tasks, but the findings of such studies may not be readily generalizable
to academic domains, such as arithmetic. Yet, investigating how children
control their performance in arithmetic is crucial in understanding the large
individual differences within this specific academic domain. This longitudinal
study investigated how children control their performance through post-error
slowing and accuracy improvement in arithmetic. We additionally examined this
development of metacognitive control in a working memory task, to further
unravel its domain-generality or the lack thereof.
Methods: A cohort of 127 typically developing children, followed up
longitudinally from 7–8 years old (2nd grade of primary school) to 8–9 years old
(3rd grade of primary school), completed an arithmetic and working memory
task at two time points.
Results and discussion: Meticulous comparison of response times and
accuracy rates following errors with those following correct answers revealed
the presence of metacognitive control at each time point. We observed
significant positive correlations between children’s metacognitive control and
their arithmetic accuracy at 7–8 years old, underscoring a possible adaptive role
of metacognitive control in the learning phase of arithmetic. No correlations
were found between the post-error adjustments in the arithmetic task and
those in the working memory task, challenging previous evidence for domain-
generality of post-error adjustments.