When students repeatedly reflect, it can enhance their metacognitive abilities, including self-regulatory skills of planning, monitoring, and evaluating. In a fluid mechanics course for undergraduates at a large southeastern U.S. university, in-class problem solving in a flipped classroom was coupled with intentional metacognitive skills instruction and repeated reflection to enhance metacognition. The weekly reflective responses were coded by two analysts to identify the recurring themes and uncover evidence of the development and/or reinforcement of self-regulating behaviors for academic management. To enable a comparison, a flipped classroom without the metacognitive instruction and repeated reflection was also implemented (i.e., non-intervention group). The two cohorts completed identical final exams. Based on our preliminary analysis with year one data, a statistically and practically-significant difference between the two cohorts was found with the free-response scores on the final exam in favor of the intervention cohort that had received the metacognitive support ( p < 0.0005; Cohen's d = 0.72). Also, the Metacognitive Activities Inventory (MCAI) indicated a significantly-higher positive change in self-regulatory behavior for the intervention cohort ( p = 0.001; d = 0.50). Focus groups were conducted to gather students’ perspectives on the reflective activity, with differences found by demographic group. In addition, a significantly higher proportion of females (versus males) viewed the reflections in a positive manner ( p = 0.05). Significant associations between themes in the weekly reflections and direct knowledge measures were also uncovered. This included a positive relationship between academic self-management (i.e., diligence and carefulness) and exam performance. Overall, our preliminary results point to a desirable impact of metacognitive instruction and repeated reflection on knowledge outcomes, metacognitive skills, and self-regulatory behaviors.
Social network development in classrooms
Abstract Group work is often a critical component of how we ask students to interact while learning in active and interactive environments. A common-sense extension of this feature is the inclusion of group assessments. Moreover, one of the key scientific practices is the development of collaborative working relationships. As instructors, we should be cognizant of our classes’ development in the social crucible of our classroom, along with their development of cognitive and/or problem solving skills. We analyze group exam network data from a two-class introductory physics sequence. In each class, on each of four exams, students took an individual version of the exam and then reworked the exam with classmates. Students recorded their collaborators, and these reports are used to build directed networks. We compare global network measures and node centrality distributions between exams in each semester and contrast these trends between semesters. The networks are partitioned using positional analysis, which blocks nodes by similarities in linking behavior, and by edge betweenness community detection, which groups densely connected nodes. By calculating the block structure for each exam and mapping over time, it is possible to see a stabilizing social structure in the two-class sequence. Comparing global and node-level measures suggests that the period from the first to second exam disrupts network structure, even when the blocks are relatively stable.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712341
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10328193
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Applied Network Science
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2364-8228
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-022-00465-z
