Knowing what you know: a pedagogical model based on learners’ metacognitive abilities

Students’ metacognition, that is, the ability to accurately assess one’s skill level and to update one’s internal model of those skills, is a crucial educational factor, as it can help students self-regulate their learning. The purpose of this thesis is to assess how individuals’ metacognitive abilities relate to learning processes and outcomes in STEM-related tasks. It also highlights how they relate to students’ characteristics, as their gender. This thesis also presents the first steps towards a methodology to teach programming and robotics to elementary-school children and a study on digital technologies in museums to present historical content. Finally, it also explores prediction and collaborative behaviour in young adults in the autistic spectrum, and how this behaviour is self-perceived during a collaborative task with an artificial agent.