Developing metacognitive skills through class activities: what makes students use metacognitive skills?

ABSTRACT

Metacognitive skills can improve with appropriate instruction, however, educators may not be familiar with these methods of teaching. This study explores what factors influenced students to implement metacognitive skills and how students perceived the purposefully designed metacognitive activity in a high school classroom in South Korea. 252 students were involved in the study and a survey and focus group interviews were employed for the data collection. A linear regression analysis revealed that perceived task values predicted the use of metacognitive skills. A thematic analysis of the interviews showed the possibility of transferring the metacognitive skills to new contexts, and the benefits of student-teacher interactions in developing their metacognitive skills. Implications of the results for research and the instructional design of the metacognitive activities are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Metacognition
• motivation
• instructional design
• metacognitive strategy
• student-teacher interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haesol Bae

Haesol Bae is a PhD candidate in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her current research interests include learning environment design, problem-based learning, scaffolding design, and teacher-student interaction.

Kyungbin Kwon

Kyungbin Kwon is an assistant professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University and teaches in the area of instructional design and computer science education. His current research interests include computer-supported collaborative learning, computational thinking, and online teaching.