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Abstract
The influence of the type of difficulty of a cognitive task on metacognitive activity (metacognitive experiences and metacognitive strategies) was studied in six-and eight-year-old children. Children had to make decisions about the correspondence of statements and drawings presented in pairs one after the other, starting either with a statement. or with a picture. They encounter two kinds of difficulties: (1) one due to the information conveyed by drawing (non-correspondence with the statement); (2) another due to the order in which the statements and drawings are presented: when the drawing comes first the child must retain it in his memory until a statement can guide him in his decoding of it; this difficulty is unexpected given the expectations the child has due to the cognitive task proposed.
The principal findings were as follows: (1) Compared to the six-year-olds. the eight-years-olds demonstrated three times more metacognitive control strategies for expressing information, more cognitive skills (reasoning). and a higher level of performance (understanding and recall). (2) The two types of difficulties do not have the same effects: (a) the difficulty due to the information conveyed by the drawing leads to an increase in the latency time; the performance (understanding) is not as good; (b) in the case of difficulty due to the statement-drawing order. twice as many verbalizations expressing metacognitive experiences and a decrease in the latency time were observed. The interpretation of the findings underscores the importance for the child of the indicators he has to orient him in mobilizing metacognitive and cognitive activities.