Central Valley Region Interdisciplinary Symposium on Education Research

Metacognition refers to the awareness of one’s own thinking processes. The benefits of metacognition on student performance are well documented and a recent study suggests that the infusion of metacognitive instruction with active learning in General Chemistry has a significant effect on student performance. General Chemistry is required as a prerequisite for STEM majors at UCM and poor performance in these gateway courses is one reason students leave STEM programs. Accurate and efficient metacognitive monitoring is critical to performance because it encourages people to reflect on their abilities relative to the demands of a task. Thus, implementing effective metacognitive strategies in gateway courses at UCM may enhance student performance and increase the retention of STEM majors. The proposed project analyzes two existing metacognitive strategies through the framework of cue-utilization. Two new potential strategies are explored: in one, metacognitive prompts are interspersed at regular intervals in a Jupyter notebook assignment; in the other, metacognitive prompts are presented after completion of the Jupyter notebook tasks. Comparing the efficacy of these two strategies may provide insight into best practices for early and more advanced college learners in STEM, driving future development of combined metacognitive and active learning activities for college chemistry.

Brittany Harding, Graduate Student, UC Merced