Metacognitive changes and sources of confidence judgements in health professions classroom learning.

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of this study was to examine sources of confidence during learning to better understand metacognition and if a metacognitive intervention improves student metacognition or assessment performance. METHODS: One-hundred fifty-eight doctor of pharmacy students participated in a semester-long intervention that included ratings of confidence as well as sources of their confidence judgments. Throughout the semester, students made metacognitive judgements on selected topics within the course. Students also completed a pre- and post-assessment which was used to examine changes in performance and metacognitive accuracy over time. RESULTS: Most students appeared to anchor their confidence (i.e. judgments of learning) on prior knowledge, particularly at the beginning of the course. Students' performance and judgements of learning (confidence) increased over the semester, but the gains in both were dependent on topic. Making metacognitive judgements on selected topics did not appear to help or hinder assessment performance or improve metacognitive accuracy for most topics. CONCLUSIONS: Students may need assistance recognizing that their prior knowledge may not be adequate to judge their current learning. To improve their judgements of learning, students should utilize more external sources (e.g., the textbook) rather than internal cognitive resources. Instructional strategies should model the task and coach students to competency (i.e. scaffold).

Multiple aspects of high school students' strategic processing on reading outcomes: The role of quantity, quality, and conjunctive strategy use.

BACKGROUND: While the literature on strategy use is relatively mature, measures of strategy use overwhelmingly measure only one aspect of that use, frequency, when relating that strategy use to performance outcomes. While this might be one important attribute of strategy use, there is increasing evidence that quality and conditional use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies may also be important. AIMS: This study examines how multiple aspects of strategy use, namely frequency, quality, and conjunctive use of strategies, influence task performance on both well- and ill-structured task outcomes in addition to other concomitant variables that may interact with strategic processing during reading. SAMPLE: The sample consisted of 21 high school students enrolled in an upper-level biology class in a suburban school in the north-eastern United States. METHODS: These participants completed measures of prior knowledge and interest, then read either an expository or persuasive text while thinking aloud. They then completed a passage recall and open-ended response following passage completion. RESULTS: In general, quantity was not positively related to the study outcomes and was negatively related to one of them. Quality of strategy use, on the other hand, was consistently related to positive reading outcomes. The influence of knowledge and interest in terms of strategies is also discussed as well as six cases which illustrate the relation of aspects of strategy use and the other concomitant variables. CONCLUSIONS: Evaluating strategy use by solely examining the frequency of strategy use did not explain differences in task performance as well as evaluating the quality and conjunctive use of strategies. Further, important relations between prior knowledge, interest, and the task outcomes appeared to be mediated and moderated by the aspects of strategy use investigated.

The relation between cognitive and metacognitive strategic processing during a science simulation.

BACKGROUND: This investigation was designed to uncover the relations between students' cognitive and metacognitive strategies used during a complex climate simulation. While cognitive strategy use during science inquiry has been studied, the factors related to this strategy use, such as concurrent metacognition, prior knowledge, and prior interest, have not been investigated in a multidimensional fashion. AIMS: This study addressed current issues in strategy research by examining not only how metacognitive, surface-level, and deep-level strategies influence performance, but also how these strategies related to each other during a contextually relevant science simulation. SAMPLE: The sample for this study consisted of 70 undergraduates from a mid-sized Southeastern university in the United States. These participants were recruited from both physical and life science (e.g., biology) and education majors to obtain a sample with variance in terms of their prior knowledge, interest, and strategy use. METHODS: Participants completed measures of prior knowledge and interest about global climate change. Then, they were asked to engage in an online climate simulator for up to 30 min while thinking aloud. Finally, participants were asked to answer three outcome questions about global climate change. RESULTS: Results indicated a poor fit for the statistical model of the frequency and level of processing predicting performance. However, a statistical model that independently examined the influence of metacognitive monitoring and control of cognitive strategies showed a very strong relation between the metacognitive and cognitive strategies. Finally, smallest space analysis results provided evidence that strategy use may be better captured in a multidimensional fashion, particularly with attention paid towards the combination of strategies employed. CONCLUSIONS: Conclusions drawn from the evidence point to the need for more dynamic, multidimensional models of strategic processing that account for the patterns of optimal and non-optimal strategy use. Additionally, analyses that can capture these complex patterns need to be further explored.