Abstract:

Background:
Educational Poverty (PE) is the deprivation for children and adolescents of the opportunity to learn, experiment, develop and freely flourish skills, talents and aspirations and is often associated with socio-cultural and economic disadvantage. The school system classifies these pupils under the definition of SEN (Special Educational Needs). Current school systems focus too much on concepts rather than cognitive knowledge and motivation. This leads to low self-esteem and low levels of learning. We believe that increasing awareness of cognitive processes and actions will lead to both greater self-esteem and better learning abilities. This is because the treatment we studied focused on the self-esteem-based Metacognitive Model.

Methodology:
Two schools in Naples and Caserta recruited 96 students aged 9 to 10 for the study. They were randomly assigned to two different treatment groups, each of which received one of two different treatments: Met-cognitive Model (M-M), the traditional one, focused on strengthening the cold aspects of metacognition vs. Metacognitive/Motivational Model (M/ M-M), a new approach with the improvement of self-esteem as the main core.

Results:
Both metacognitive models improved students' academic skills more substantially. The M/M-M model also improved the perception of academic success, self-confidence and self-esteem while the traditional Metacognitive model only improved reading and calculation skills and had a positive effect on writing skills.

Conclusion:
Our study shows that a metacognitive educational intervention is effective in subjects living in disadvantaged conditions and contributes to increasing knowledge; but to be more effective this intervention must also include work on the key aspects of metacognition and self-esteem.

Keywords:

Metacognition, Self-esteem, Poverty Education.