Teaching metacognition: Helping engineering students take ownership of their own learning

Abstract

In this Work In Progress paper, we describe an NSF-funded research project designed to generate transferable tools that can be used to teach and evaluate undergraduate engineering students' metacognitive skills. Metacognition, defined as the knowledge and regulation of one's own cognitive (or thinking) processes, is critically important to student learning and particularly instrumental in problem-solving. Nonetheless, much of the research has occurred in controlled research settings and little is known about how to help students develop metacognitive skills in classroom settings. Through this project, we are working to close this gap by creating and testing a set of interventions designed to help students develop metacognitive skills and to help faculty teach and evaluate this important skill.