Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of cooperative training strategies to enhance students' socioscientific decision making as well as their metacognitive skills in the science classroom. Socioscientific decision making refers to both “describing socioscientific issues” as well as “developing and evaluating solutions” to socioscientific issues. We investigated two cooperative training strategies which differed with respect to embedded metacognitive instructions that were developed on the basis of the IMPROVE method. Participants were 360 senior high school students who studied either in a cooperative learning setting (COOP), a cooperative learning setting with embedded metacognitive questions (COOP+META), or a nontreatment control group. Results indicate that students in the two training conditions outperformed students in the control group on both processes of socioscientific decision making. However, students in the COOP+META condition did not outperform students in the COOP condition. With respect to students' learning outcomes on the regulation facet of metacognition, results indicate that all conditions improved over time. Students in the COOP+META condition exhibited highest mean scores at posttest measures, but again, results were not significant. Implications for integrating metacognitive instructions into science classrooms are discussed.
Highlights
Over the past decades curriculum authorities as well as science educators and researchers worldwide have called for changes in the way science is taught at schools (e.g., [1,2,3,4])
We investigated two cooperative training strategies which differed with respect to embedded metacognitive instructions that were developed on the basis of the IMPROVE method
Working with complex socioscienti c issues poses high cognitive demands on students, Education Research International because students need to engage in various information search and evaluation processes as well as argumentation, reasoning, and problem solving processes. is involves the ability to take perspectives and to integrate multiple perspectives into the development of solution strategies. us, implementation of learning settings that enable students to engage in peer interactions and motivate them to argue, to reason, and to negotiate how to solve these problems and hereby participate in discourse on modern science problems is crucial (e.g., [7, 11, 17, 18])
Summary
Over the past decades curriculum authorities as well as science educators and researchers worldwide have called for changes in the way science is taught at schools (e.g., [1,2,3,4]). Still only few studies exist that analyse the effects of such metacognitive or self-regulated learning settings on students’ socioscienti c decision making and reasoning (e.g., [27, 28]). E present study aims to contribute to this research need It analyses the effects of embedded cooperative-metacognitive trainings on senior high school students’ reasoning and decision making about socioscienti c issues. Labuhn and colleagues showed again in a pre-post-follow up control-group design that self-regulated learning elements can be successfully integrated into science classrooms They showed that students who studied in a self-regulated learning condition outperformed students who studied under traditional instruction on a knowledge test about decision-making processes [57]. We assume that students who learn in a cooperativemetacognitive setting will produce better learning outcomes with respect to socioscienti c reasoning and decision making than students who study in a cooperative learning setting
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