This study was carried out to investigate how metacognitive activity, particularly cognitive regulation, manifests in the collaborative planning of chemistry practical investigations by senior undergraduate students in a simulated industrial project. The students worked in home groups to evaluate three synthetic routes for a given compound, and decided on a preferred route while considering the criteria of cost, technical challenge, and environmental impact. During the planning session, the students who were evaluating the same synthetic routes convened in specialist groups to draw up detailed experimental procedures for their routes. Audio recordings of the two specialist and the four home group discussions were purposively selected, transcribed, and analysed for manifestations of metacognitive regulation. The system of coding employed interrogated not only the manifestations of metacognitive regulation at play (planning, monitoring, control and evaluation), but facilitated an in-depth look at the types of regulation, i.e. self or other, the areas where students applied their efforts towards regulation (cognition, behaviour and task performance) as well as the depth of cognitive regulation (low or high). The coding scheme went beyond serving as a tool for characterising manifestations of metacognitive activity, it developed into a framework which provides a finer theoretical elucidation of the social nature of metacognition. Metacognitive activity in this context was found to be predominantly other-regulatory, manifesting mostly as control and monitoring, with much fewer instances of planning and evaluation. These observations were made across all groups despite the differences in social context. The findings of this study showed that peer interaction in collaborative tasks can facilitate achievement of collective conceptual understanding and learning gain through inter-individual regulation in social contexts. Strategies such as metacognitive prompts, teaching students about team development techniques and exposing students to collaborative ill-structured tasks could be helpful in this regard.

Exploring metacognitive activity in a collaborative third year organic chemistry laboratory

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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