الفهرس 
Theories about Cognitive, Metacognitive Development, and Physical Environment’s Impact
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Abstract
The architectural environment is necessarily a reflective echo of every development in cognitive and pedagogical theories. While recent studies in these pedagogical theories discuss how it is essential to keep the connection between nature and children, our days, urbanism and technological approaches surpass the natural elements in children’s environments. Therefore, according to these theories, this raises the question of how far or close enough our children’s environments are to what the children actually need. Theories in the Environmental Psychology field emphasize that children are affected by the surrounding environment they occupy. In addition to that, they mention that nature is the richest environment for supporting their thinking skills and creativity. What if the biophilic design attributes – as an approach to child-nature connection – enhance these cognitive theories and support children’s metacognitive skills in their spaces through child-nature connection? Many researchers studied the effect of the biophilic design approach on children’s physical, psychological, and social aspects (226,975 articles since the year 2000). However, the cognitive aspect was the least to be studied, with a gap in metacognition and high-order thinking skills. To address this question, this study focuses on the designs for early childhood centers, navigating the effect of a biophilic design approach on supporting metacognition in young children. Metacognitive thinking is one of the essential processes in the cognitive field, being a source for supporting reflective thinking, self-regulation, problem-solving, and creativity. This study revisits design criteria for childcare centers through data collection, data analysis, and a comparative case study between childcare centers of different nature connection levels, and conducts an online questionnaire for parents of young children aged three to six years old. This study focuses its scope on early years children in small-sized childcare centers in Cairo, Egypt.