Abstract

In Latin American contexts the relationship between educational success and socio-economic status (SES) has usually been established. In general, people from poorer backgrounds have been found to greatly underperform those from richer socio-economic contexts. The present study explored how social class might relate to differences in reflective metacognitive capacities from an early age. Sixteen 8 to 9 years old children from higher and lower SES participated of the study. Children' reflective abilities and performance were explored through behavioral analysis of their learning activities in a cube assembly task. Results showed that children from higher SES outperformed those from lower SES in terms of accuracy of assembly and reflective metacognitive processes (e.g., monitoring and evaluation of own goal-oriented actions, awareness of errors, learning from errors). Interestingly, however, there seems to be a distinctive role of the level of task challenge on children's performance and reflective metacognitive processes according to SES. Children from lower SES were only outperformed in the challenges considered to be of mid-difficulty by the experimenter and also in those tasks in which the children reported not to feel challenged. Conversely, when lower SES children felt challenged they tended to be able to engage in more learning from their own errors than higher SES children, but less key steps for final success, such as evaluation at the end of the task. The study suggest that differences between children from higher and lower SES families in terms of performance might be explained by their own level of consciousness about task difficulty and subsequent activation of behaviours to overcome such a challenge.