How Advanced Students Self-Regulate their Higher-Order Thinking in Three Disciplines

• In Event: Reimagining Epistemic Cognition for a Changing World: Knowing in an Age of Too Much Information

Abstract

Abstract
In today’s complex and fast-changing world, individuals must engage with challenging topics that demand both self-regulated learning (SRL) and higher-order thinking (HOT). SRL refers to the process by which learners pursue goals via active planning, monitoring, and adapting their cognition, motivation, behavior, and emotions. HOT encompasses skills such as analyzing, evaluating, and creating knowledge (e.g., epistemic cognition). However, SRL research has rarely involved truly complex tasks and there is little research on how people self-regulate their HOT during such tasks. Therefore, in this study, we investigated how SRL and HOT were enacted by advanced learners in biology, medicine, and psychology during engagement with complex, domain-specific tasks, with special attention paid to how learners regulated their HOT.
We recruited nine participants for the study – three senior undergraduates each in biology and psychology and three first-year medical students. All participants completed one lower-order task (i.e., a reading passage and answering factual questions) and two higher-order discipline-specific tasks (i.e., answering questions in molecular biology, evaluating abstracts and meta-analyses in psychology, and generating differential diagnoses in medicine) while thinking aloud.
Verbalization data were transcribed and used to develop a codebook to capture themes related to SRL during complex tasks, HOT, and epistemic cognition. Participants exhibited varying levels of SRL (i.e., micro- and macro-level processing) and HOT across disciplines and tasks, and revealed new themes not captured in the SRL and HOT literatures. Macro-level themes included planning, metacognition, cognitive strategy use, and epistemic cognition. Novel themes, which were converted into codes for data analysis, included perspective taking, which involved participants taking other’s perspectives to talk through the problem [“So if I have a cough... And I’ve got like all this weight loss, and I feel really terrible... What else might be going on with me?”], and judgment of quality, a metacognitive judgment of the fit between standards and their current product. In some cases, when outcomes did not meet their standards, participants engaged in a self-convincing resolution to move on rather than continue refining their product. Additionally, participants prioritized ideas by importance and guide decision-making [“So this should probably be like a little bit lower in my list of things to get, because… we want to figure out if this guy's got something acute that's killing him first.”]. In terms of epistemic cognition, participants used disciplinary norms, during which they recalled a discipline-specific practice or views to make decisions [“Along that framework, do what... any clinician would do in case of uncertainty. Get a CMP.”].
With these novel codes finalized, we are coding all nine participants’ data and in our presentation at the conference we will be able to discuss commonalities and domain-specific aspects of SRL, HOT, epistemic cognition, and the self-regulation of HOT. Our initial findings have already confirmed the importance of studying domain-specific mental processing during truly complex tasks, revealing novel aspects of SRL, HOT, and epistemic cognition and their interactions, which will inform education on the new literacies needed in the 21st century digital, artificial-intelligence-driven world.

Authors

• Jeff A. Greene, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Aditi Ahuja, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Yeojin Choi, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Ruogu Xu, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill