Primary School Children’s Use of External and Internal Cues in the Monitoring of Working Memory

Metacognitive monitoring plays a crucial role in primary school learning, enabling children to detect uncertainty and regulate behavior accordingly. Although substantial evidence demonstrates that monitoring supports successful long-term memory in children, considerably less research has examined how primary school children monitor their working memory, despite its central role in processing and maintaining information across domains. This exploratory study examined working memory monitoring in 8- and 10-year-olds and the extent to which they rely on external cues (task hints) and internal cues (retrieval fluency) to inform their monitoring. Swiss children from second grade (8-year-olds, N = 138) and fourth grade (10-year-olds, N = 122) completed verbalizable and visuo-spatial working memory tasks in both a cue and a no-cue condition and gave confidence judgments after each trial. Both age groups distinguished between correct and incorrect responses, indicating the emergence of monitoring skills despite clear age-related improvements in working memory performance. However, cue use varied by age and task: External cues improved monitoring only in 8-year-olds and only in the verbalizable WM tasks, documenting developmental and task-specific constraints on effective cue integration. Across tasks and age groups, children in our sample relied on retrieval fluency to inform their judgments, although this cue influenced monitoring differently in partially incorrect answers. Overall, the findings suggest that primary school children use multiple sources of information when evaluating their working memory. However, the effectiveness of cues depends on the child’s age, the modality of their working memory, and the informativeness of the cues.