The effectiveness of the metacognitive model with children in disadvantaged conditions.

Background: Educational Poverty (EP) is associated with socio-cultural and economic disadvantage mainly during the first years of life. Unfortunately, current education systems focus on knowledge transmission, neglecting the know-how and the motivation for learning; we hypothesize that increasing awareness on one’s cognitive processes and actions allows optimizing both learning and the perception of academic success. Methods: 88 subjects between the ages of 9 and 10 were recruited from eight schools in the province of Caserta and Naples and were randomly assigned to two groups, each of which received one of two different treatments: Structural Organizational (SO) model centered on resilience vs. Motivational Metacognitive Model (MM). Results: Both interventions were effective in improving academic skills, but the MM intervention allowed a more significant improvements in the correctness parameter, both for reading and calculation skills, as well as for writing skills and in the perception of academic success. Conclusion: Our study shows that a didactic intervention of a metacognitive type is effective within subjects living in a disadvantaged condition and contributes to increasing knowledge about educational poverty. Moreover, it could offer an example of intervention on school systems aimed at improving both teaching quality and educational plans.