PhD Oral Exam - Elizabeth Dutemple, Psychology

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Good academic performance can set a child up for success in the long term in many ways, including opening doors to scholarships, job opportunities, and personal thriving. Understanding the factors contributing to early school success is an important way we can help foster children’s development and flourishing. Although there are several social and cognitive factors that contribute to children’s success at school, this dissertation focused on two cognitive skills. It sought to identify which was the strongest predictor of early academic performance: executive functions (i.e., the ability to plan and execute tasks) or metacognition (i.e., knowing our thoughts). These cognitive skills have been consistently linked to academic achievement in different capacities but have rarely been directly compared. This is important, as the two skills have also been linked to each other, where some have even argued that metacognition is a form of executive functioning. Understanding their relation in the academic context is, therefore, an essential step to understanding what interventions could help children better succeed. To this end, the two studies included in this dissertation present data from the same cohort of children, first in kindergarten and then in first grade, whose academic abilities, as well as executive function and metacognition, were measured. The first study looked at the cross-sectional relation between the variables. In contrast, the second study focused on results at the second time point while highlighting the longitudinal relationships between the variables. Based on the available literature, we expected both cognitive skills to be related to academic abilities, with metacognition emerging as the stronger predictor.

Both studies measured executive functions using the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task (DCCS) and the Flanker task from the NIH toolbox. Metacognition was measured by asking for children’s confidence levels after answering visual discrimination questions and asking if they wanted help answering these questions. Though both of these measures were verbal, one was explicit (confidence) and the other implicit (asking for a cue), as the latter did not require children to explicitly report the status of their knowledge. Importantly, we also added a nonverbal implicit measure of metacognition by measuring children’s response time to choose their answers. This novel design allowed us to examine metacognition’s link to academic abilities in more depth.

The first study measured school readiness using the Lollipop task, which assessed children’s basic literacy and numeracy skills. Results suggested a significant relation between verbal metacognition measures (confidence and request for help) and school readiness. The second study measured academic achievement using the reading and mathematics scales from the Weschler Individualized Achievement Test (WIAT-III, WIAT-II-FR). Concurrent results suggested a strong link between executive functions and academic achievement as a whole. Longitudinal results identified school readiness as a powerful predictor of academic achievement, as well as an indirect link between executive function scores at time 1 and academic achievement results at time 2 through executive function scores at time 2, suggesting cognitive abilities in the kindergarten year can partially predict academic performance one year later. Taken together, these results indicate that the relations between cognitive and academic skills are complex and changing in the early school years and may be more important for different learning genres. Implications of these results are discussed as well as future directions for the field.