Examining Students' Metacognitive Awareness Through Analysis of Student-generated Learning Responses

Abstract

Marie C. Paretti is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she codirects the Virginia Tech Engineering Communications Center (VTECC). Her research focuses on communication in engineering design, interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, design education, and gender in engineering. She was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to study expert teaching in capstone design courses, and is co-PI on numerous NSF grants exploring communication, design, and identity in engineering. Drawing on theories of situated learning and identity development, her work includes studies on the teaching and learning of communication, effective teaching practices in design education, the effects of differing design pedagogies on retention and motivation, the dynamics of cross-disciplinary collaboration in both academic and industry design environments, and gender and identity in engineering. Miss Cassandra Jo Groen, Virginia TechCassandra is currently a PhD student in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. Her research interests include student engineering identity development, communication practices and discourse strategies, power negotiation, and student artifact development. She earned her Masters (2011) and Bachelors (2009) degrees in Civil Engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, SD. Mr. Benjamin David Lutz, Virginia TechBen Lutz is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. His research interests include design teaching and learning, mentoring in design and project work, student experiences in engineering design, the transition from engineering school into the workplace, and also efforts for inclusion and diversity within engineering. His current work is in related understanding how students describe their own learning in engineering, and how that learning supports transfer of learning from school into professional practice as well as exploring students' conceptions of diversity and its importance within engineering fields. Work-in-Progress: Examining students' metacognitive awareness through analysis of student-generated learning responses AbstractThis work-in-progress provides a preliminary exploration of students' metacognitive monitoring abilities by analyzing written self-evaluations of statics problems. Metacognitive approaches to learning encourage students to examine their own thinking processes as a means of deepening their understanding. We used qualitative coding to analyze students' level of metacognitive awareness regarding both their ability to solve a given problem and their ability to identify sources of error. The full data set includes 10 response sequences (homework solution and student writing about their solution) from 69 students. In this paper, we present the analysis of two of these sequences, one from early and one from later in the semester. The findings show that for both assignments, about half the students recognized their inabilit...

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