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Metacognition is the understanding of your own knowledge including what knowledge you do not have and what knowledge you do have. This includes knowledge of strategies and regulation of one’s own cognition. Studying metacognition is important because higher-order thinking is commonly used, and problem-solving skills are positively correlated with metacognition. A positive previous disposition to metacognition can improve problem-solving skills. Metacognition is a key skill in design and manufacturing, as teams of engineers must solve complex problems. Moreover, metacognition increases individual and team performance and can lead to more original ideas. This study discusses the assessment of metacognitive skills in engineering students by having the students participate in hands-on and virtual reality activities related to design and manufacturing. The study is guided by two research questions: (1) do the proposed activities affect students’ metacognition in terms of monitoring, awareness, planning, self-checking, or strategy selection, and (2) are there other components of metacognition that are affected by the design and manufacturing activities? The hypothesis is that the participation in the proposed activities will improve problem-solving skills and metacognitive awareness of the engineering students. A total of 34 undergraduate students participated in the study. Of these, 32 were male and 2 were female students. All students stated that they were interested in pursuing a career in engineering. The students were divided into two groups with the first group being the initial pilot run of the data. In this first group there were 24 students, in the second group there were 10 students. The groups’ demographics were nearly identical to each other. Analysis of the collected data indicated that problem-solving skills contribute to metacognitive skills and may develop first in students before larger metacognitive constructs of awareness, monitoring, planning, self-checking, and strategy selection. Based on this, we recommend that the problem-solving skills and expertise in solving engineering problems should be developed in students before other skills emerge or can be measured. While we are sure that the students who participated in our study have awareness as well as the other metacognitive skills in reading, writing, science, and math, they are still developing in relation to engineering problems.
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Studies of Primate Metacognition are Relevant to Determining What Form Introspection Could Take in Different Intelligent Systems
Comparative research assessing metacognition in nonhuman animals contributes to the question of what form introspection could take in humans, non-humans, and other possibly conscious systems. We briefly review some major findings in comparative metacognition research, including some discoveries in areas looking at self-regulation and self-control. We discuss what data exist to address the three conditions for introspection defined by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) in their target article. We suggest that two of three conditions are met by existing data from non-human primates, and that the third condition may be more difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to assess. We argue that a comparative and developmental approach to this question of how to define and measure introspection is a productive avenue to make progress in this area.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2043667
- PAR ID:
- 10625953
- Publisher / Repository:
- Imprint Academic
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Consciousness Studies
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 1355-8250
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 102 to 112
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Metacognition and self-regulation are important skills for successful learning and have been discussed and researched extensively in the general education literature for several decades. More recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how metacognitive and self-regulatory skills contribute to student success in the context of computing education. This paper presents a thorough systematic review of metacognition and self-regulation work in the context of computer programming and an in-depth discussion of the theories that have been leveraged in some way. We also discuss several prominent metacognitive and self-regulation theories from the literature outside of computing education – for example, from psychology and education – that have yet to be applied in the context of programming education. In our investigation, we built a comprehensive corpus of papers on metacognition and self-regulation in programming education, and then employed backward snowballing to provide a deeper examination of foundational theories from outside computing education, some of which have been explored in programming education, and others that have yet to be but hold much promise. In addition, we make new observations about the way these theories are used by the computing education community, and present recommendations on how metacognition and self-regulation can help inform programming education in the future. In particular, we discuss exemplars of studies that have used existing theories to support their design and discussion of results as well as studies that have proposed their own metacognitive theories in the context of programming education. Readers will also find the article a useful resource for helping students in programming courses develop effective strategies for metacognition and self-regulation.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.53765/20512201.30.9.102
