Scaffolding Metacognition Through Self-Created Prompts

• In Event: 63.033 - Scaffolding Metacognition

Abstract

Objectives: Research in the field of self-regulated learning has investigated scaffolds that shall foster strategic learning processes and learning performance (Azevedo & Hadwin, 2005; Lin, 2001). One promising kind of intervention that has been tested in numerous experimental studies is prompting throughout the learning process (Bannert, 2009). Prompts require the learners to reflect on their own learning process or even ask for the execution of metacognitive learning activities, i.e. metacognitive prompts. Despite of the positive effects of prompting the research do also show that many students do not comply with the prompts in an appropriate manner. Asking them about the prompts reveals that they feel restricted in their autonomy by the prompts (Bannert & Mengelkamp, 2013).
Hence, our research aims to foster the experience of autonomy and thus improve the compliance with the prompts using a new kind of prompting, that is, students shall create their own prompts and learn with them afterwards. We expect that self-created metacognitive prompts will increase student’s compliance with the prompts and show more positive effects on the learning process and learning outcome.
Methods: We conducted two experiments in which university students of the experimental groups were instructed to create their own prompts and to learn with them afterwards. In Experiment 1 we compared the effects of learning with self-created metacognitive prompts (EG=35) vs. learning without prompts (CG=35) in an individual lab setting using the thinking aloud method. The prompts asked the students to reflect on their metacognitive activities they are just involved in by selecting them on a prompted list. Before learning started students of the EG were shown a list of important metacognitive activities (e.g. planning, goal specification, orientation …) and were asked to modify them. Additionally, they were asked to set 8 time stamps when their modified prompts should be presented during learning in order to support their reflection and metacognitive activities during learning.
In Experiment 2 we compared the effects of learning with such self-created metacognitive prompts (EG1=52) with learning with conventional fixed metacognitive prompts (EG2=54) and learning without prompts (CG=55) in a computer-pool setting without thinking aloud.
In both experiments students’ task was to learn the concepts and principles of operant conditioning within 40 minutes. Immediately after hypermedia learning the learning outcome was obtained.
Results and Significance: Results confirm the positive effects of self-created prompts on learning process and outcome in Experiment 1 with the highest effect on student’s transfer performance (t(1,69) = 1.85, p < .05). These effects were not so obvious in Experiment 2. Here learner characteristics play a much more important role: Especially students with low verbal ability and reading skills benefit more when learning with self-created metacognitive prompts (verbal ability: R2 = .15, F(5, 156) = 5.55, p<.001; reading skills: R2 = .11, F(5, 156) = 4.92, p<.001). In general, this research shows not only the significance of metacognitive instructional scaffolds during self-regulated learning, but also that students need to be much more involved in the design of learning scaffolds in order to make them effective.

Authors

• Maria A. Bannert, Technical University of Munich

• Christoph Sonnenberg, University of Wuerzburg

• Christoph Mengelkamp

• Elisabeth Pieger