This study investigated fourth and fifth graders’ metacognitive knowledge about writing and its relationship to writing performance to help identify areas that might be leveraged when designing effective writing instruction. Students’ metacognitive knowledge was probed using a 30-minute informative writing prompt requiring students to teach their reader how to be a good writer (i.e., a metawriting task). The metawriting task was coded for eight dimensions of metacognitive knowledge. Students’ writing performance was assessed via additional 30-minute prompts—two narrative, one informative, two persuasive—and evaluated for quality and length using automated essay scoring. Students were most aware of general characteristics of writing quality and production procedures, but they were less aware of substantive processes, genre, or other dimensions. Multiple regression analysis showed that, after controlling for demographics and literacy skills, only knowledge of general characteristics of writing and production procedures uniquely predicted outcomes. Overall, metacognitive writing knowledge inconsistently predicted writing performance.

中文翻译：

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小学生关于写作的元认知知识及其与跨体裁写作成果的关系

本研究调查了四年级和五年级学生关于写作的元认知知识及其与写作表现的关系，以帮助确定在设计有效的写作教学时可能会利用的领域。学生的元认知知识通过 30 分钟的信息写作提示进行探究，要求学生教他们的读者如何成为一名优秀的作家（即元写作任务）。元写作任务针对元认知知识的八个维度进行编码。学生的写作表现通过额外的 30 分钟提示进行评估 - 两个叙述性的，一个信息丰富的，两个有说服力的 - 并使用自动论文评分评估质量和长度。学生最了解写作质量和制作程序的一般特征，但他们不太了解实质性过程、体裁或其他方面。多元回归分析表明，在控制人口统计和读写能力后，只有了解写作和生产程序的一般特征才能唯一预测结果。总体而言，元认知写作知识与写作表现的预测不一致。