Board 35:Metacognition: Helping Students Plan, Monitor, and Evaluate Study Skills and Strategies

In STEM education, numerous studies have explored how instructors, pedagogy, and curriculum affect student learning, with less attention paid to the impact of student characteristics on academic performance. Yet students' own beliefs, choices, practices, and behaviors can and do affect their academic outcomes. Applying research on learning from the fields of education and the social and behavioral sciences is only now impacting research in undergraduate engineering education, one of five major shifts in this field during the past 100 years. Still, engineering education research has not drawn widely on the existing research on metacognition— monitoring, understanding, and controlling thoughts that may lead to more productive behavior and practices. In 2016, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers at a Hispanic Serving Land Grant University in the Southwest embarked on a study of how the introduction of metacognition and strategies on “learning how to learn” to engineering students could impact their performance in class. Our preliminary data indicates that 75% of freshmen, 50% of sophomores, and 35% of juniors do not routinely adopt effective study strategies. Our NSFfunded research project focuses on freshman students enrolled in Engineering 100, Introduction to Engineering, which is part of the innovative First-year “Engineering Experience” program. Along with improving instruments to assess metacognitive thinking, we are developing minimally-intrusive interventions including a workshop, handouts, and reflective writing designed to improve students’ metacognitive awareness (their ability to monitor and control their own learning) and knowledge of effective study strategies. This paper presents preliminary findings on this intervention. Pre-post results are discussed for students who received the metacognitive awareness and study strategy intervention versus those who did not.