Metacognition and Self-Efficacy in Action: How First-Year Students Monitor and Use Self-Coaching to Move Past Metacognitive Discomfort During Problem Solving.
Stephanie M Halmo, Kira A Yamini, Julie Dangremond Stanton
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Stronger metacognitive regulation skills and higher self-efficacy are linked to increased academic achievement. Metacognition and self-efficacy have primarily been studied using retrospective methods, but these methods limit access to students' in-the-moment metacognition and self-efficacy. We investigated first-year life science students' metacognition and self-efficacy while they solved challenging problems, and asked: 1) What metacognitive regulation skills are evident when first-year life science students solve problems on their own? and 2) What aspects of learning self-efficacy do first-year life science students reveal when they solve problems on their own? Think-aloud interviews were conducted with 52 first-year life science students across three institutions and analyzed using content analysis. Our results reveal that while first-year life science students plan, monitor, and evaluate when solving challenging problems, they monitor in a myriad of ways. One aspect of self-efficacy, which we call self-coaching, helped students move past the discomfort of monitoring a lack of understanding so they could take action. These verbalizations suggest ways we can encourage students to couple their metacognitive skills and self-efficacy to persist when faced with challenging problems. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for helping first-year life science students develop and strengthen their metacognition to achieve improved problem-solving performance.
期刊介绍:
CBE—Life Sciences Education (LSE), a free, online quarterly journal, is published by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The journal was launched in spring 2002 as Cell Biology Education—A Journal of Life Science Education. The ASCB changed the name of the journal in spring 2006 to better reflect the breadth of its readership and the scope of its submissions.
LSE publishes peer-reviewed articles on life science education at the K–12, undergraduate, and graduate levels. The ASCB believes that learning in biology encompasses diverse fields, including math, chemistry, physics, engineering, computer science, and the interdisciplinary intersections of biology with these fields. Within biology, LSE focuses on how students are introduced to the study of life sciences, as well as approaches in cell biology, developmental biology, neuroscience, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and proteomics.