Metacognition, or student recognition of what they know or do not know, plays an important role in science education.     Well-developed metacognitive skills have been linked to successful problem solving ability, a vital factor for discovery and invention in chemistry and other STEM fields.    We have been exploring the metacognitive abilities of students enrolled in introductory chemistry courses at a large public university.  Quantitatively, we have found a large disparity between student confidence in answering questions versus their actual ability to provide the correct answer, indicating a lack of metacognitive awareness.  To better understand how students make metacognitive judgments, student interviews were designed and implemented to specifically monitor the metacognitive actions of students while engaging with chemistry topics.   The interviews revealed specific student difficulty pertaining to question type and how materials had been presented in class.   It also revealed some difficulty on the part of the students to accept their lack of knowledge, even when faced with the inconsistency between their confidence and their actual abilities.  We hope to use these findings to designspecific pedagogical adaptations to increase the accuracy of the self-assessment and ultimately to improve student learning.

Metacognitive abilities of introductory chemistry students: A qualitative investigation

247th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.