A Study on the Effectiveness of Metacognitive Support in High School Physics Classes

Abstract

According to Okino and Matsumoto (2011), metacognitive support is defined as “Identification of the naive conception,” “Identification of the acquisition process of the naive conception,” and “Connection and collation of the naive conception and the scientific concept.” It provides step-by-step support to teaching strategies. This study is concerned with the first two definitions, and, accordingly, two core questions were prepared and practiced. Question 1 assumes metacognition as “Identification of the naive conception,” and question 2 assumes it to be “Identification of the acquisition process of the naive conception.” To make this practice more effective and easier to follow step-by-step, two worksheets were created for two different classes. In Class A, the “TPSQ” worksheet reflected question 1 and asked students to think about whether a new question had arisen. Class B used the “TPS” worksheet, which does not discuss the creation of new questions, to reflect question 2. In addition, the survey was conducted in advance, after the classes, and after a delay. There were two notable results: (1) Class A, which had discussed the generation of new questions, tended to have longer memory retention times; and, (2) there was a tendency for the students in Class A to try to describe the new questioning while considering the results of the entire experiment. Therefore, in this study, metacognitive support was confirmed to be more effective if the question that arises is considered and written in the “clarification of the simple conception” stage.