Self-regulated learning (SRL) is often seen as an important goal of education, where the learner has enough metacognitive awareness and sufficiently well-developed ‘study skills’ to operate as an independent learner – rather than being dependent upon a teacher to offer direction whenever a decision needs to be made: have I done enough? Is this good enough? What should I do next? Etc. There has tended to be a view that as these as quite are quite high-level processes they appear relatively late in our cognitive development. However, a study reported in ZDM: The International Journal on Mathematics Education by Whitebread and Coltman (2010) suggests that the previous failures to recognise metacognitive behaviour in young children may be due to insensitive methodology rather than the lack of metacognitio itself. Their own careful observations of 3-5 year-old learners suggested that “When the children…were given reasons for articulating their thinking which made sense to them, they appeared to be more capable in this regard than perhaps previously indicated” (Whitedread & Coltman, 2010, p. 176).