Assessment of First-Year Students’ Metacognitive Ability in Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA): Toward Curriculum Development

Abstract

Introduction: Metacognition is the awareness of knowledge how one learns in addition to whatone learns and to understand how a task will be performed. Metacognitive skill as self-assessmentis recognised as an important contributor to the development of critical capacity, reflective attitudeand autonomous life-long learning. Accurate, self-assessment of knowledge and skills is essential forstudents to maintain and improve through self-directed learning. Objective: The objective of thisstudy was to explore, how well students’ evaluate their own level of understanding for lectures toreflect their metacognitive skill that can be used in educational strategy to promote students’ personaland professional growth. Methods: To assess the metacognition of the students, a questionnaire basedon three items was designed. All 60 (17 male and 43 female) preclinical, first-year medical studentswere included in this study. The metacognition as planning, monitoring and evaluating the lecture wasjudged through students’ response on 33 lectures in terms of understanding of knowledge, clearingof misconceptions and presenting of a well prepared material respectively in the field of haematologyand parasitology. Metacognition as reflected in the lecture understanding level (LUL) score, lecturespreparation level (LPL) score and students question level (SQL) score was estimated for its correlationwith student’ achievement score in pre-clinical phase of MBBS program. Results: The data wasanalysed for correlation between metacognition and overall students’ achievement scores and astatistically significant correlation between LUL and multiple true false (MTF) of 268 (p = .039),LPL and MTF of .282 (p = .029) as well as between SQL and MTF of .360 (p = .005) was comparedto poor correlation between LUL, LPL and SQL and the other three assessment tools (short essayquestions [SEQ], problem-based questions [PBQ] and objectively structured practical examination[OSPE]) was found. Conclusion: The significant correlation of students’ metacognition and theirachievement score in classroom setting with MTF and poor correlation with SEQ, PBQ and OSPE isattributed to multiple factors discussed in this study, imperative to students’ personal and professionalgrowth.