Abstract
This article examines the impact of applied metacognition on the development of geographical causal structures by students in the geography classroom. For that, three different metacognitive strategies were designed: a. action plan, activating meta-knowledge prior to problem-solving and simultaneously visualizing action steps for dealing with the task (A); b. circular thinking (C), a loop-like, question-guided procedure applied during the problem-solving process that supports and controls content-related and linguistic cognition processes; c. reflexion (R), aiming at evaluating the effectivity and efficiency of applied problem-solving heuristics after the problem-solving process and developing strategies for dealing with future tasks. These strategies were statistically tested and assessed as to their effectiveness on the development of complex geographical causal structures via a quasi-experimental pre-posttest design. It can be shown that metacognitive strategies strongly affect students’ creation of causal structures, which depict a multitude of elements and relations at a high degree of interconnectedness, thus enabling a contentually and linguistically coherent representation of system-specific properties of the human–environment system. On the basis of the discussion of the results, it will be demonstrated that metacognitive strategies can provide a significant contribution to initiating systemic thinking-competences and what the implications might be on planning and teaching geography lessons.
Highlights
The target of the subject geography is to teach and stimulate the comprehension of complex system-relationships [1]
Based on the present study, it can be concluded that the application of metacognitive strategies and methods has a large effect on the construction of contenually correct, and on the number of multicausal geographical, causal links (Table 4; Figure 6)
Metacognition leads to a qualitatively and quantitatively improved creation of multicausal geographical causal structures when solving complex tasks (Table 4, Figures 5 and 6). It becomes clear how important the implementation of metacognitive strategies of thinking and acting might be for learning-effective geography lessons, in particular concerning the promotion and the establishment of systemic thinking competences
Summary
The target of the subject geography is to teach and stimulate the comprehension of complex system-relationships [1] (pp. 10–12). A series of studies (i.e., [4,5,6,7,8]) have given evidence, that students do not succeed at their best, neither contentually nor linguistically, when dealing with complex (multicausal), systemic thinking and developing geographical causal structures (effect-relationships) in the context of complex problem-solving processes in the geography classroom. Systemic thinking or, geographical causal structures as its smallest component, are the object and result of a complex problem-solving process [7,9]. This problem-solving process is, as the authors suggest, marked by a content-related, a linguistic, and a strategic dimension. Content-relatedly, the problem-solving process requires the identification of a multitude of elements and relationships, the creation of highly interconnected causal relationships between those elements, and a comprehensive representation of system-specific properties, structures, and interactions [10,11] (p. 544)
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