The notion that greater learning outcomes will be achieved if the cognitive work is distributed amongst a group of individuals working together versus working alone has received mixed support when explored empirically (e.g., Daiute & Dalton 1993;Johnson & Johnson, 1991). This study examined the relationship between small-group collaborative learning structures and the potential predictors of groups' overall academic performance. We sought to identify specific factors that distinguished high-performing groups from low-performing groups in the classroom. Class attendance and individual-level academic performance were positively related to group-level academic performance. Further, it was predicted that groups consisting of an exceptionally high-performing member, or superstar, would achieve greater group-level academic performance than groups consisting of members who performed similarly. However, the greater the distance between the highest-performing member's score and the average of the other group members' scores on individual-level tasks, the lower the score on group-level tasks. This difference between the highest scoring group member and the rest of the members is referred to as the Superstar Difference Score. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicated that the Superstar Difference Score is a reliable, negative predictor of group-level academic performance. Practical implications for classroom instructors and future directions for education research resultant from this study's superstar effect are discussed.
Concerns persist regarding high school students' chemistry learning. Learning chemistry is challenging because of chemistry's innate complexity and the need for students to construct associations between different, yet related representations of matter and its changes. Students should be taught to reason about and consider chemical phenomena using ‘triplet’ representations. A meta-language to discuss chemistry learning with students regarding these representations and their use is therefore necessary. This paper reports on a classroom intervention in which the teacher used the term ‘triangulation’ as an expression to stimulate metacognitive reflection in students to consider the importance and use of these representations for their learning of chemistry. Students understood and could elaborate the meaning of triangulation. However, their views of the importance and reported use of cognitive processes associated with it varied across individuals. Despite the variation, this study highlights the potential of developing students' metacognition by explicitly engaging them in considering means of representing the chemistry subject material they are being asked to learn, and how they might learn it using strategies and activities that are aligned with the nature of that material.
This paper reports on the development, self-critique and evolution of research methods for interpreting and understanding students' metacognition that were developed through the Metacognition and Reflective Inquiry (MRI) collaborative study. The MRI collaborative was a multi-year, multi-case, research study that investigated the elusive nature and character of high school students' metacognition across formal and informal science learning contexts. The study's research design comprised a series of integrated, layered, interpretive case studies which were conducted in a hermeneutic fashion over a 3 year period. The implementation of each case study provided an opportunity for the researchers to reflect critically on the research methods used to elucidate metacognition and hence refine the individual and collective capacity, responsiveness and fruitfulness of the methods used. This paper discusses the evolution of these methods and the lessons that the entire study provides for the conceptualization of other qualitative-interpretivist studies.
Keywords Research methods . Metacognition . Qualitative research . Research design
Nature and Definition of MetacognitionMetacognition is a construct that is often considered to have a core focus on the improvement of students' learning processes and outcomes. Flavell's seminal work (Flavell 1976(Flavell , 1979 has generated continued interest in and research regarding how educators can develop, enhance, and measure students' metacognition. However, there appears to be no uniform definition of metacognition in the literature (Larkin 2006). Veenman et al. (2006) highlighted the ongoing concern raised by Wellman (1985) that metacognition is a fuzzy
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