The question of what students gain by engaging in socioscientific inquiry is addressed in two ways. First, relevant literature is surveyed to build the case that socioscientific issues (SSI) can serve as useful contexts for teaching and learning science content. Studies are reviewed which document student gains in discipline specific content knowledge as well as understandings of the nature of science. SSI are also positioned as vehicles for addressing citizenship education within science classrooms. Although the promotion of citizenship goals seems widely advocated, the specifics of how this may be accomplished remain underdeveloped. To address this issue, we introduce socioscientific reasoning as a construct which captures a suite of practices fundamental to the negotiation of SSI. In the second phase of the project, interviews with 24 middle school students from classes engaged in socioscientific inquiry serve as the basis for the development of an emergent rubric for socioscientific reasoning. Variation in practices demonstrated by this sample are explored and implications drawn for advancing socioscientific reasoning as an educationally meaningful and assessable construct.

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Abstract:Metacognition loosely refers to one's "thinking about thinking" and is often defined by its accompanying skills (such as monitoring and evaluating). Despite the tendency for researchers to use metacognition as an overarching umbrella term, cognitive and educational theorists argue as to whether metacognition is a single construct or made up of distinct, differentiable factors. Given the lack of clarity in the definition of metacognition and its potential components, the purpose of this investigation is to determine whether a two-factor model, representing knowledge and regulation of metacognition, or five-factor model, representing metacognitive knowledge, planning, monitoring, regulation/control, and evaluation, emerges following both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Participants (N =644) from a select number of classes at a large Midwestern university we selected to complete the Metacognition Questionnaire, a 30 item survey designed to measure five components of metacognition that are rarely measured concurrently. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) revealed a two-factor model resembling metacognitive knowledge and regulation. This two-factor model had Further confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) showed that the two-factor model outperformed the five-factor model based on the fit indices. This study confirms that the componential view of metacognition should be based on the same two-factor model that has been used in previous literature. Educational implications of this study are discussed.

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Across two studies, we developed and tested a declarative metacognitive interview to investigate the effects of developmental level and verbal intelligence on children_s metaconceptual understanding of processes related to concept use and object categorization. Metaconceptual knowledge developed throughout elementary school, with near ceiling scores for adults. IQ scores correlated positively with metaconceptual interview scores for all groups of children. Study 2 confirmed a relationship between scores on the metaconceptual interview and performance on a Twenty Questions task for which strategic performance was presumed to depend on such knowledge, though metaconceptual knowledge was most important when IQ was lower. Implications for theory development and hypotheses about how metaconceptual knowledge develops are discussed. Keywords Intelligence . Metaconceptual KnowledgeChildren_s developing knowledge of their own cognitive activities can influence strategy use and performance across a variety of task domains. Although much research has been devoted to children_s metacognitive awareness of processes related to memory, comprehension, and attention, there have been few studies devoted specifically to children_s understanding of processes related to concept learning and category use. Flavell (1986) initially coined the term metaconceptual knowledge to refer to children_s and adults_ ability to access their knowledge of the appearance-reality distinction and to verbally articulate what they know about their Metacognition Learning (2006) 1: 51-67