The Development of Engineering Students' Metacognitive Skills in Informal Engineering Learning Activities

Abstract

IntroductionThe ability to analyze and evaluate one's own thinking and acquisition of knowledge and skills, or metacognition, is an important set of skills for engineering students to acquire. Metacognition is simply defined as "thinking about thinking" or "cognition about cognition" [8]. It is awareness of one's learning processes and regulation of one's learning behaviors [8]. In this paper, we will address two types of metacognitive skills: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation. Flavell [8] described metacognitive knowledge as an individual's knowledge about their own cognitive processes; metacognitive regulation is a process in which individuals monitor, regulate and evaluate cognitive activities to attain particular cognitive goals [25]. Metacognitive skills are related to learning. Students who understand how to apply metacognition to their learning had a better understanding of learning and were more successful [1, 9, 17]. Specifically, students' self-awareness of their learning processes facilitated learning and performance [2]. In addition, students' application of metacognitive skills in practice supported students' learning within different contexts and improved their adaptive capabilities within those contexts [23]. Because adaptive capabilities are critical within the engineering workplace, it is important that engineering students learn metacognitive skills necessary to develop adaptive capabilities. The purpose for this work is to examine students' statements about their experiences within engineering competitions and a service-based learning project identifying their metacognitive reflections about their participation in these informal learning environments. Background and MotivationThe conceptualization of "thinking about thinking" has evolved since Flavell [8] first discussed metacognition. Researchers have agreed that metacognition consists of knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition [8,19,20,25]. Knowledge about cognition describes individuals' self-knowledge, knowledge about strategies, as well as appropriate application of different strategies in practice. Knowledge about cognition consists of three types of knowledge including declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and conditional knowledge [10]. Regulation of cognition indicates that individuals are capable of planning, managing information, monitoring, debugging and evaluating [10,20,24,25].

Students’ Metacognitive Strategies Revealed Through Reflections on Their Learning of Process Engineering Concepts and Skills

“…While reflection as "a way of thinking […] is complex, rigorous, intellectual, emotional and time consuming" [12, p. 844], metacognitive skills can be taught by providing suitable opportunities for development across the curriculum. Such skill development that could help students move beyond the novice level in their profession [13].…”

Board 257: Development and Initial Outcomes of an NSF RIEF Project in Understanding Teamwork Experience and its Linkage to Engineering Identity of Diverse Students

“…Teamwork experiences are influenced by the behaviors or skills students bring to their teams and the disagreement they have. Prior research has explored how teamwork experiences connect to learning (Werpetinski 2017), technical communication (Zhu & Meuth 2015), metacognition (Xu et al 2017), psychological safety (Miller et al 2019), and socialtechnical thinking (Claussen et al 2021). However, little is known about how teamwork informs or is informed by engineering identity development.…”