Teachers’ mediation in students’ development of cognition and metacognition

ABSTRACT

Enhanced metacognition among students is imperative for the optimum completion of academic tasks. Therefore, empowering teachers to mediate and teach metacognitive skills is of enormous importance. This study explores the implementation of a workshop designed teacher mediation method by focussing on the patterns of teacher-student interactions and consequent student’s transfer of learning from cognition to metacognition. This qualitative study employs phenomenology and involves three secondary school teachers of Mathematics, English and Science and their students in China. The teachers were trained via an instructional design workshop to use language as a tool to develop and facilitate the metacognitive skills of students during problem-solving. Subsequent to the workshop, data was collected by observing a dialogic talk between teachers and students. Observational data were further scrutinised and explicated under three themes: mediation through assessment as learning, consolidation of prior knowledge and promoting autonomy. By unravelling the patterns of teacher-student interactions vis-à-vis the researcher-designed mediation process, this study highlights an explicit method in the facilitation of students’ metacognition which could be further validated and refined.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching and learning
• mediation
• metacognition
• cognition
• dialogic talk

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lina Guo

Lina Guo is a PhD student at the Faculty of Education, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. She began studying for her PhD in 2018 and expected to complete in 2021. Her research interests include, cognitive and metacognitive development, dialogic assessment, Digital instructional activity design and e-learning. Her PhD research topic is “mediational metacognitive engagement in flipped learning”.