Embedding metacognitive exercises in the curriculum to boost students' conceptual understanding

BACKGROUND Engineers Australia asserts that professional engineers must exhibit technical competency, defining advanced engineering knowledge as being able to “comprehend and apply advanced theory-based understanding of engineering fundamentals to predict the effect of engineering activities.” For engineering students in particular, metacognitive activity has been linked to their problem solving skills. Despite this link, operationalizing metacognitive activities in the curriculum to enhance problem solving has been difficult to materialise, and the few successful examples vary in scope and design. PURPOSE This paper extends prior investigations of a new curricular approach for embedding a metacognitive exercise in the curriculum that leads to students’ greater conceptual understanding and evaluates the approach’s potential to help students develop new capabilities for solving problems. DESIGN/METHOD The Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy by Biggs and Collis (1982) was reconstituted as an in-class activity so students could recognise variations in structural complexity of various topics. Following the activity, students’ justifications were analysed qualitatively to determine how the activity helped them recognise deficiencies in their own responses. Participating students were quantitatively compared to their non-participating peers on the subsequent summative assessment with respect to their 1) self-reported confidence, 2) performance, and 3) metacognition. RESULTS Nearly two-thirds of students justified their self-allocated, less-than-perfect mark by indicating their responses lacked depth. The activity showed students how their own answers were not yet fully developed and suggested how they could improve for the future, an essential aspect of formative assessment and feedback. Students also began to recognise that how diagrams are used in responses are more important than whether or not they are included in a response. Quantitative metrics on a subsequent, summative assessment showed significantly higher Cognitive Strategy and confidence measures as well as slightly higher performance for students who participated in the SOLO activity relative to their non-participating peers. CONCLUSIONS Paying attention to the characteristics of SOLO responses (e.g., using figures in multiple responses) presents an additional opportunity for helping students learn the important distinction between quantity versus structural complexity in their answers. By making such complexity visible to students, they will be more likely to enhance the complexity of their own responses when answering similar problems in the future. Evaluations of the adjusted SOLO activity presented in this paper demonstrate its potential to enhance students’ awareness of their cognitive strategies when solving problems, which may ultimately promote students’ confidence and problem solving abilities.