Department of Cellular Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602.
Department of Cellular Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2017 Summer;16(2). doi: 10.1187/cbe.16-09-0286.
Students with awareness and control of their own thinking can learn more and perform better than students who are not metacognitive. Metacognitive regulation is how you control your thinking in order to learn. It includes the skill of evaluation, which is the ability to appraise your approaches to learning and then modify future plans based on those appraisals. We asked when, why, and how upper-division biology students evaluated their approaches to learning. We used self-evaluation assignments to identify students with potentially high metacognition and conducted semistructured interviews to collect rich qualitative data from them. Through content analysis, we found that students evaluated their approaches to learning when their courses presented novel challenges. Most students evaluated in response to an unsatisfactory grade. While evaluating study strategies, many students considered performance and learning simultaneously. We gained insights on the barriers students face when they try to change their approaches to learning based on their evaluations. A few students continued to use ineffective study strategies even though they were aware of the ineffectiveness of those strategies. A desire to avoid feeling uncomfortable was the primary reason they avoided strategies that they knew were more effective. We examined the behavioral change literature to help interpret these findings.
具有自我意识和自我控制思维能力的学生，比那些没有元认知的学生能够学到更多的知识，表现得更好。元认知调节是指你控制自己的思维以进行学习的方式。它包括评估技能，即评价学习方法的能力，然后根据这些评价修改未来的计划。我们询问了高年级生物学学生何时、为何以及如何评估他们的学习方法。我们使用自我评价作业来识别具有潜在高元认知能力的学生，并对他们进行半结构化访谈，以从他们那里收集丰富的定性数据。通过内容分析，我们发现学生在课程提出新的挑战时会评估他们的学习方法。大多数学生在成绩不理想时进行评估。在评估学习策略时，许多学生同时考虑表现和学习。我们了解了学生在根据评估尝试改变学习方法时所面临的障碍。一些学生尽管意识到这些策略无效，但仍继续使用无效的学习策略。他们避免使用他们知道更有效的策略的主要原因是，他们不想感到不舒服。我们研究了行为改变文献，以帮助解释这些发现。
