Students’ Metacognition and Metacognitive Strategies in Science Education

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, educators and policy makers have argued metacognition is an important, even crucial, component in teaching, learning, and assessing meaningful understanding in science. Therefore, they have recommended that learning and applying metacognitive strategies become part of science curriculum starting as early as kindergarten, through middle and high school, and continuing at the college and university levels. In this chapter, we identify how the construct of metacognition was used in studies of assessment of students’ learning outcomes in science education, focusing on students’ (a) metacognitive strategies, (b) self-regulated learning, and (c) metacognition training for fostering students’ scientific thinking. Our review relates to metacognition, assessment, and science education as documented by organizations such as National Research Council (NRC) and archived in three leading journals. The review included about 300 publications, most of which were published during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The studies described in these papers investigated learning processes of students of all ages, from elementary school to higher education. We describe (a) the aspects of metacognition these studies involved, (b) whether the studies investigated metacognition in general or specific aspects of it, such as knowledge or regulation of cognition, (c) the results regarding students’ learning processes, and (d) the tool(s) that served to assess students’ metacognitive skills. Analyzing this review, we have identified a gap between what researchers strive to achieve and what can actually be found in the literature. This review enables researchers to determine whether, to what extent, and in what ways metacognition and assessment in science education have been implemented in science courses and studied in this context. Finally, we discuss the features of an ideal metacognitive-based pedagogical intervention and assessment tool, and what aspects of metacognition in science education warrant further research.