The effects of metacognitive ability in story comprehension of mental retarded children

The present study was designed to investigate the role of metacognition monitoring story comprehension for retarded children. Subjects were 26 retarded children, ranging in chronological age from 8 : 7 to 15 : 5, in mental age from 3 : 5 to 9 : 11, and 31 normal children in chronological age from 4 : 2 to 8 : 4. Retarded children were divided into 3 groups with metacognitive ability according to the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) : the recognition for the goal of task, the intention for the solution of task, and the strategy use. The material was made of four stories. The experiments were composed of two tasks for each story. First, subjects were asked to make the order of the episode in the story ; and second, they were asked to tell the content of the episode. From these experiments, it was found that with increase of metacognitive ability, scores in both tasks became higher. The metacognitive ability functioning in story comprehension for retarded children was then discussed.