Exploratory Appraisal of Metacognitive Skilfulness and Academic Performance of Rural Adolescents

Abstract

Metacognition refers to learners' automatic awareness of their own knowledge and their ability to understand, control, and manipulate their own cognitive processes. Metacognitive skills are important not only in school, but throughout Ufe.Metacognitive-like processes are especially ubiquitous when it comes to the discussion of self-regulated learning. Being engaged in metacognition is a salient feature of good self-regulated learners. Groups reinforcing collective discussion of metacognition are a salient feature f self-critical and self-regulating social groups. The activities of strategy selection and application include those concerned with an ongoing attempt to plan, check, monitor, select, revise, evaluate etc.Metacognition is 'stable' in that learners' initial decisions derive from the pertinent fact about their cognition through years of learning experience. Simultaneously, it is also 'situated' in the sense that it depends on learners' familiarity with the task, motivation, emotion, and so forth. Individuals need to regulate their thoughts about the strategy they are using and adjust it based on the situation to which the strategy is being applied. At a professional level, this has led to emphasis on the development of reflective practice, particularly in the education and health-care professions.Metacognition helps people to perform many cognitive tasks more effectively. Strategies for promoting metacognition include self-questioning (e.g. What do I already know about this topic? How have I solved problems like this before?), thinking aloud while performing a task, and making graphic representations (e.g. concept maps, flow charts, semantic webs) of one's thoughts and knowledge. Carr (2002) argues that the physical act of writing plays a large part in the development of metacognitive skills. (Gammil, 2006)Metacognitive abilities begin to develop around the age of 5 to 7 years and improve throughout school (Flavell et al., 1995; Gamer 1990). Perry et al. (2000) while working with 1st and 2nd graders found that asking students two questions helped them become more metacognitive. The questions were What did you learn about yourself as a reader/writer today? and What did you that you can do again and again and again? When teachers asked these questions regularly during class, even young students demonstrated fairly sophisticated levels of metacognitive understanding and action. On the contrary, Annevirta and Vauras (2006) examined the development of meta-cognitive skill in elementary school children. The results divulged that children with initially high metacognitive level had better metacognitive skill in problem-solving tasks during first two school years, whereas the self-guided behaviour of children with lower metacognitive knowledge resembled more the type of adult-dependent behaviour typical of young children as late as the second grade. So, there was no clear developmental relationship between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills.Strategy Evaluation Matrices (SEM) can help to improve the knowledge of cognition component of metacogntion. The SEM works by identifying the declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge about specific strategies. The SEM can help individuals identify the strength and weaknesses about certain strategies as well as introduce them to new strategies that they can add to their repertoire.Objectives of the study* To examine the metacognitive profile of rural adolescents.* To assess the academic performance of rural adolescents.Locale of the studyThe study was conducted in Ludhiana City of Punjab state.MethodParticipantsThe sample for the present study comprised of randomly selected 240 rural adolescents studying in grade 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th from Ludhiana District.InstrumentsThe following standardized tools were used to collect the relevant data for the study.Personal Information Sheet was used to assess the socio-personal profile of the adolescents, viz. …