The Zoo Task: A novel metacognitive problem-solving task developed with a sample of African American children from schools in high poverty communities.

Metacognition is important for monitoring and regulating cognitive processes, decision-making, problem-solving, and learning. Despite widespread interest in metacognition, measuring metacognition in children poses a significant challenge. Some qualitative and observational metrics exist but are restricted by scalability, range of metacognitive components measured, and use of different metrics compared with tasks for adults.

Maternal Mind-Mindedness Provides a Buffer for Pre-Adolescents at Risk for Disruptive Behavior.

Maternal mind-mindedness, defined as the propensity to view one's child as an agent with independent thoughts and feelings, mitigates the impact of low maternal education on conduct problems in young children (Meins et al. 2013), but has been little studied beyond the preschool years. Addressing this gap, we applied a multi-measure and multi-informant approach to assess family adversity and disruptive behavior at age 12 for a socially diverse sample of 116 children for whom ratings of disruptive behavior at age 6 were available.