**Author details**

146 Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition

processes (Allen & Armour-Thomas, 1991).

Piagetian (cognitive) theorists generally agree:

and Socratic dialogue).

active, discovery-oriented environment).

development (i.e., peer teaching and social negotiation).

**11. Conclusion** 

In line with Piaget's view that an environment rich with challenges appropriate to the stage of a child's development was more important than trying to force the pace of change in order to help increase the pace of cognitive development, it seems that everyday challenges emerging from the new social context in this study, provide fertile environments for the development of metacognition. The highest 'meta-level' of cognition is usually not implicated when we receive an outside task and when the task solution is known. This is one reason why we do not think about our life goals in our everyday activities. The metalevel only tends to be consulted when things go wrong or when the situation is new. Therefore, the meta-level tends to come into play when we move house or location, or we are encouraged to consider our life and or educational goals in a more general sense, something we are surely disposed to do when moving away from home environment and culture. In other words, the challenging new social context of living away from home, and for the mainland Chinese students, in a different culture increases the use of metacognition because the student cannot call upon routinised or 'automatic' cognition. There is almost a requirement in these circumstances to have knowledge about and control over thinking

According to Driscoll (1994), there are three basic instructional principles on which

**Principle 1:** The learning environment should support the activity of the learner (i.e., an

**Principle 2:** The learner's interactions with peers are an important source of cognitive

 **Principle 3:** Instructional strategies that make learners aware of conflicts and inconsistencies in their thinking promote cognitive development (i.e., conflict teaching

Why then should metacognitive strategies such as planning, monitoring and evaluating one's own learning evolve more effectively when undergraduates are away from their home environment and culture? Vygotsky's (1986) view was that in order to subject a function to intellectual and voluntary control, we must first possess that function. In other words, metacognition and self-reflection will develop first as a skill before it can be used as a series of consciously controlled strategies (Lynch et al., 2006). The emphasis on social interaction as a pre-condition for the training of reflective skills is today shared by many approaches to instruction (Von Wright 1991). For example, the use of reciprocal or 'peer' teaching forces the teacher to use a whole series of metacognitive processes such as identifying what the learner already knows, deciding what is to be learned and how; monitoring understanding and evaluating the outcome in terms of increased understanding. This, in turn, encourages the teacher to reflect upon their own thinking processes. In terms of social constructivist theory, metacognitive processes begin as social processes and gradually become "internalised" (Downing, 1991; Lewis & Downing, 2000). The social context of living in an

Kevin Downing *City University of Hong Kong, Yau Yat Tsuen, Kowloon, Hong Kong* 
