Changing the Metacognitive Orientation of a Classroom Environment to Stimulate Metacognitive Reflection Regarding the Nature of Physics Learning

Problems persist with physics learning in relation to students' understanding and use of representations for making sense of physics concepts. Further, students' views of physics learning and their physics learning processes have been predominantly found to reflect a ‘surface’ approach to learning that focuses on mathematical aspects of physics learning that are often passed on via textbooks and lecture-style teaching. This paper reports on a teacher's effort to stimulate students' metacognitive reflection regarding their views of physics learning and their physics learning processes via a pedagogical change that incorporated the use of a representational framework and metaphors. As a consequence of the teacher's pedagogical change, students metacognitively reflected on their views of physics and their learning processes and some reported changes in their views of what it meant to understand physics and how they might learn and understand physics concepts. The findings provide a basis for further explicit teaching of representational frameworks to students in physics education as a potential means of addressing issues with their physics learning.     

Context-based learning and metacognitive prompts for enhancing scientific text comprehension

ABSTRACT

Context-based learning (CBL), promoting students' scientific text comprehension, and fostering metacognitive skills, plays an important role in science education. Our study involves CBL through comprehension and analysis of adapted scientific articles. We developed a module which integrates metacognitive prompts for guiding students to monitor their understanding and improve their scientific text comprehension. We investigated the effect of these metacognitive prompts on scientific text comprehension as part of CBL in chemistry. About 670 high school chemistry students were randomly divided into three groups exposed to high- and low-intensity CBL. One of the high-intensity groups was also exposed to metacognitive prompts. Research tools included pre- and post-questionnaires aimed at measuring students' conceptual chemistry understanding and metacognitive knowledge in the context of reading strategies, before and after exposure to the CBL. Chemistry understanding was reflected by students' ability to identify the main subject of the adapted article and by explaining concepts both textually and visually. We found that high-intensity CBL combined with metacognitive prompts improved students' chemistry understanding of the adapted scientific articles and the ability to regulate their learning. Our study establishes that reading context-based adapted scientific articles advances students' conceptual chemistry understanding. These gains are strongly amplified by domain-specific metacognitive prompts.     

Less direct than you thought: Do teachers transmit math value to students through their cognitive support for understanding?

Students' valuing of subject domains is an important contributor to students' educational success. As one avenue to foster students' valuing, social-cognitive motivational theories suggest that teachers might transmit their value beliefs to students through their instructional strategies. Accordingly, the current study examined the transmission of teacher's math value to students' math value via the content-related instructional strategy of cognitive support as reported by teachers and students. Using a longitudinal dataset of 1429 students (51% males, 68% Hispanic) and their 26 teachers (48% female), manifest-latent multilevel regression analyses showed some indication that teacher's endorsement of math valuing for their students, but not their personal value beliefs, might be associated indirectly with class average students' interest value through teacher's provision of cognitive support. Furthermore, teacher's reported cognitive support was related to the class average of students' value beliefs through class average students' perceptions of cognitive support, highlighting the importance of students' perceptions.     

教师与学生的理想学生观念研究--兼论开放型问卷数据的定量分析

学生的理想学生观念反映了学生作为学习者的自我认识,并对其受教育动机和愿望有重要影响,而教师的理想学生观念与教室内主流的教育教学模式紧密相关。研究采用半结构式问卷的方法,让教师和学生罗列出他们认为理想学生应具备的最重要的五项特征。研究结果表明,小学教师和学生的理想学生观念主要体现在学习、道德、行为和身心发展四个类别上,其中学生的理想学生观念中成绩好非常重要,但对学习动机、学习能力和学习习惯的重视程度不高;而教师的理想学生观念中最重要的是学生的品德,教师对学习成绩、学习动机和学习能力的重视程度较高,对学习习惯的重视程度较低。教师与学生的理想学生观念存在差异,且他们的观念与国家课程改革提出的教育目标也存在差异。     

The relationship between personal epistemology and self-regulation among Turkish elementary school students

The purpose of the study was to determine the level of the relationship among Turkish elementary school students' personal epistemologies, motivation, learning strategies, and achievements in science. A total of 322 fifth-grade students participated in the study. Results from the structural equation modeling showed that students' personal epistemologies influence both their motivation and metacognitive strategies in science learning. Viewing scientific knowledge as constructed by the learner contributes to the students having high motivations, high science achievement, and the ability to engage metacognitively in learning tasks.     

Students' Consent to a Teacher's Pedagogical Authority

In this paper student comments are examined to identify a typology of demands for granting their consent to a teacher's pedagogical authority. The data for this study (136 written responses and 66 interviews) have been collected from students in a Finnish comprehensive school and examined by means of a theory-bounded content analysis. The results show that the students in this study expressed views which amounted to a typology of demands. If their demands are met, students will grant consent to their teacher's pedagogical authority and, consequently, allow the teaching, studying, and learning of the content under consideration. Securing students' consent to authority in the classroom will provide a new perspective on the phenomenon of a teacher's pedagogical authority. It is argued that a teacher's pedagogical authority and student consent to pedagogical authority are complementary ways of sharing power in the classroom and bringing about a pattern of empowerment.     

Students' self‐regulation and teachers' influences in science: interplay between ethnicity and gender

The purpose of this study is to explore students' self‐regulation and teachers' influence in science and to examine interplay between ethnicity and gender. Analysis of data from seven Oslo schools (1112 sampled students in the first year of high school) shows that the ethnic minority students reported using learning strategies in science more intensively than ethnic majority students and they had a stronger motivation to learn science. Ethnic majority students are defined here as students who were born in Norway and have at least one parent born in Norway. The study also shows that minority students generally evaluate their science teacher's influence on their learning more positively than the majority. The strongest interplay effects between gender and ethnicity are found in students' perceptions of the relevance of science, as well as their degree of negative responses to the pressure to learn science.     

The interplay between students' motivational profiles and science learning

Students' motivation plays an important role in successful science learning. However, motivation is a complex construct. Theories of motivation suggests that students' motivation must be conceptualized as a motivational system with numerous components that interact in complex ways and influence metacognitive processes such as self-evaluation. This complexity is further increased because students' motivation and success in science learning influence each other as they develop over time. It is challenging to study the co-development of motivation and learning due to these complex interactions which can vary widely across individuals. Recently, person-centered approaches that capture students' motivational profiles, that is, the multiplicity of motivational factors as they co-occur in students, have been successfully used in educational psychology to better understand the complex interplay between the co-development of students' motivation and learning. We employed a person-centered approach to study how the motivational profiles, constructed from goal-orientation, self-efficacy, and engagement data of N = 401 middle school students developed over the course of a 10-week energy unit and how that development was related to students' learning. We identified four characteristic motivational profiles with varying temporal stability and found that students' learning over the course of the unit was best characterized by considering the type of students' motivational profiles and the transitions that occurred between them. We discuss implications for the design and implementation of interventions and future research into the complex interplay between motivation and learning.     

Developmental patterns of school students' motivational‐ and cognitive‐metacognitive competencies

This study examined the metacognitive developmental patterns of Hong Kong school students. Students rated their own metacognitive competencies by responding to an inventory of six motivational‐ and cognitive‐metacognitive subscales. Results showed that students' metacognitive competencies decreased with age—from primary 4 (age 9) to secondary 5 (age 17)—with a sharp decline noticeable at the primary/secondary school transition. Age had a more powerful effect than gender on students' perception of their metacognitive competencies. This decreasing pattern of Hong Kong students' metacognitive competencies is contrary to the developmental trends found in Western countries. However, the comparatively high academic performance of Hong Kong students also suggests some different recommendations about student learning.     

Beliefs about teaching: Persistent or malleable? A longitudinal study of prospective student teachers' beliefs

This longitudinal study focused on change in university students' beliefs about the role of teachers. The students (n = 80) were Estonian undergraduates, whose beliefs were investigated in the first and third years of their studies and followed up to the point at which the students either entered teacher education or chose other paths. Beliefs about teaching were neither unambiguously persistent nor malleable. Students who continued in teacher education exhibited stronger beliefs about the teacher as pedagogue and aligned less with the belief that the teacher's role is to be a subject matter expert than peers who did not choose teacher education.     

Reification of instructional materials as part of the process of developing problem‐based practices in mathematics education

This teacher development study closely examined a teacher's practice for the purpose of understanding how she selected and implemented instructional materials, and correspondingly how these processes changed as she developed her problem‐based practice throughout a school year. Data sources included over 20 hours of planning and analysis meetings with the teacher and 27 video‐taped lessons with discussions before and after each lesson. Through qualitative analysis we examined the data for: students' cognitive demand for curricular materials the teacher selected and implemented; teacher's beliefs and practices for students' engagement in mathematical thinking; and teacher's and students' communication about mathematics during instruction. We found that the teacher shifted her views and use of instructional materials as she changed her practice towards more problem‐based approaches. The teacher moved from closely following her traditional, district‐adopted textbook to selecting problem‐based tasks from outside resources to build a curriculum. Simultaneously, she changed her practice to focus more on students' engagement in mathematical thinking and their communication about mathematics as part of learning. During this shift in practice, the teacher began to reify instructional materials, viewing them as instruments of her practice to meet students' needs. The process of shifting her views was gradual over the school year and involved substantial analysis and reflection on practice from the teacher. Implications include that teachers and teacher educators may need to devote more attention and support for teachers to use instructional materials to support instruction, rather than materials to prescribe instruction. This use of instructional materials may be an important part of transforming practice overall.     

Implicit STEM ability beliefs predict secondary school students' STEM self-efficacy beliefs and their intention to opt for a STEM field career

Despite the widely accepted view that low self-efficacy beliefs negatively influence students' intention to opt for a STEM field oriented study or career path, it remains unclear how to effectively stimulate these beliefs in students who do seem to have the ability and motivation to opt for a STEM career. A suggestion from previous literature is that students' implicit beliefs about the malleability of their learning ability can have a major impact on their self-efficacy beliefs, and, importantly, that these implicit beliefs are malleable themselves. Even though this relation between implicit beliefs, self-efficacy, and STEM field aspirations has been suggested multiple times, there is no empirical evidence to support this claim. The goal of the current study was to examine whether implicit beliefs about the malleability of STEM ability are associated with secondary school students' intention to opt for a STEM field bachelor's degree, using a Structural Equation Modelling approach. Furthermore, we examined the mediating role of STEM-oriented self-efficacy beliefs on the relationship between implicit ability beliefs and STEM intention. We used a Likert-type questionnaire, consisting of subscales to measure ability beliefs, self-efficacy, and intention to opt for a STEM degree of secondary school students in their fifth grade (n = 483). Results showed that there is a positive relation between implicit STEM ability beliefs and the intention to opt for a STEM field bachelor degree, and that this relation is partly mediated by self-efficacy beliefs. Incremental STEM ability beliefs predicted positive self-efficacy beliefs and increased STEM intention. These findings provide a foundation for a novel approach to stimulate and motivate students for the STEM field, namely by stimulating incremental beliefs about their STEM ability.     

Nature/nurture and intelligence in current introductory educational psychology textbooks

Self-regulated learners understand, value, and engage academic learning in ways that are fundamentally different than their peers who have difficulty in school. We discuss how students become aware of themselves as learners and the kinds of theories that students construct about schooling. Children's ideas about success and failure, their awareness and attribution, and their metacognition and motivation, develop concurrently as they progress through formal education. We focus on developmental changes in students' theories about learning and how they are influenced by variables in school such as task difficulty, helping behavior, and standards of success. Instructional conditions that promote children's self-regulated learning are also discussed. We believe that self-regulated learning is a desirable educational outcome that can be fostered by teachers who minimize academic competition, explain appropriate strategies, provide assistance during problem solving, and promote an atmosphere of collaboration in classrooms.     

Teachers’ belief that math requires innate ability predicts lower intrinsic motivation among low-achieving students

Many students find math difficult, but those who are intrinsically motivated learn and do well even when they face obstacles. Here, we examine an environmental factor that might affect students' intrinsic motivation in math: namely, teachers' beliefs about success in math. Do teachers perceive elementary school math as a domain that requires an innate ability, and does this belief relate to students' intrinsic motivation in math? Our study explored these questions in a sample of 830 German fourth graders and their 56 teachers. Teachers reported stronger beliefs in the role of innate ability for math than for German language arts. In addition, the more teachers believed that math requires innate ability, the lower was the intrinsic motivation of their low-achieving students. These results suggest that teachers’ beliefs that math success depends on innate ability may be an important obstacle to creating a classroom atmosphere that fosters engagement and learning for all students.     

Pedagogical Thinking in a Student's Mind: A conceptual clarification on the basis of self‐determination and volition theories

This article suggests that educational psychology should pay more attention to the role of the curriculum when the optimal motivation to learn in school is considered. The curriculum frames the teaching‐studying‐learning process in school. This fact has several implications on the motivation to learn in school. After the child starts school, his or her motivation to learn seems to change from an intrinsic motivation to an extrinsic motivation. To develop pedagogical thinking in a student's mind means that the student must become acquainted with the aims and goals of the curriculum, assimilate them into his or her integrated sense of self and, thus, fully accept them as their own. If this succeeds, it will have positive effects on the student's motivation at school and especially on the motivation to study and learn. The concept of pedagogical thinking in a student's mind is analogous to the concept of teacher's pedagogical thinking. Based on previous studies, this article provides an example of how joint‐planning can offer a learning environment that promotes students' pedagogical thinking and the internalisation of the aims and goals of the curriculum in school. This article calls for new theoretical syntheses and research programmes that better take into account the normative nature of learning and teaching in school.     

Reflections on and implications of the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 (PISA 2015) performance of students in Taiwan: The role of epistemic beliefs about science in scientific literacy

The 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has drawn a substantial amount of attention from science educators and educational policymakers because it marked the first time that PISA assessed students' ability to evaluate and design scientific inquiry using computer-based simulations. We undertook a secondary analysis of the PISA 2015 Taiwan dataset of 7,973 students from 214 schools to identify critical issues of student learning and potentially reshape our educational system and policies. Thus, this study sought to identify potential latent clusters of students' scientific literacy performance according to a set of focus variables selected from the PISA student questionnaires. In addition, significant determinants of students' scientific literacy and resiliency were analyzed. Cluster analysis results demonstrated the presence of four clusters of high, medium, low, and inferior scientific literacy/epistemology/affective dispositions. Specifically, students in cluster 1 compared with other clusters showed that the higher the scientific literacy scores are, the more positive epistemic beliefs about science, achievement motivation, enjoyment of science, interests in broad science, science self-efficacy, information and communications technology (ICT) interest, ICT autonomy, more learning time, more teacher supports and teacher-directed instructions are. Regression results indicated that the most robust predictor of students' scientific literacy performance is epistemic beliefs about science, followed by learning time, interest in broad science topics, achievement motivation, inquiry-based science teaching and learning practice, and science self-efficacy. Decision tree model results showed that the descending order of the variables in terms of their importance in differentiating students as high- versus low-performing were epistemic beliefs about science, learning time, self-efficacy, interest in broad science, and scientific inquiry, respectively. A similar decision tree model to determine students as resilient versus non-resilient also was found. Various interpretations of these results are discussed, as are their implications for science education research, science teaching, and science education policy.     

Does higher education foster critical and creative learners? An exploration of two universities in South Korea and the USA

This paper describes two studies that explore students' beliefs about critical and creative learning at two universities, and considers the implications of those beliefs in comparison to the universities' stated education goals. One is a mixed method study of students at a top university in Korea, and the second is a comparative study between the Korean university and a United States (US) university. The first study found that both high-achievers and the general population at a top Korean university perceived their critical and creative abilities as lower than their receptive learning abilities, and that higher achievers were neither more critical nor creative than lower achievers. The second study finds that the Korean university students, compared to US students, were more likely to rate their receptive learning ability as higher than their critical and creative learning abilities. Comparisons across year of higher education (HE) suggest that Korean students' perceptions did not significantly change with respect to year in school, while US students' perceptions of critical learning abilities significantly increased across school years. Results are discussed with respect to the impact of culture, epistemological beliefs, and HE instruction on critical and creative learning.     

Variation in Finnish students' understanding of Lutheranism and its implications for religious education: a phenomenographic study

This article contains the results of how a selected group of Finnish upper secondary students understand Lutheranism. The data consisted of 63 students' responses to a writing task together with complementary interviews of 11 students. The outcomes of phenomenographic analysis of variation in the students' understanding of Lutheranism are presented in five hierarchically ordered categories. The implications for religious education are discussed in terms of what teachers could learn from differences in students' understandings of the subject matter in order to enhance their learning of it.     

Exploring the participation and agency of students with special education needs in a Macau-Chinese secondary school

The research explores the perceptions of five secondary school students with special education needs (SEN) about their participation in learning, group membership, and agency within an inclusive school in Macau SAR. This goal is achieved by using students' voices documented in open-ended interviews and is underpinned by the conceptual framework of heutagogy. The aim is to shed light on students' perceptions on school effectiveness in supporting their needs through successful participation and agentic possibilities. Findings showed that students were more prone to social rejection and being isolated or bullied than their peers. They were struggling to feel included or participate, their needs were only partially being met, and they had few opportunities to exert influence on their educational trajectories. Recommendations are provided to assist educators and schools in enhancing students with SEN to connect to the learning process and community, with the provision of appropriate learning adjustments and more active approaches to ensure their acceptance by mainstream students, including the formation of coaching peers to assist in developing social and academic skills under teacher's scaffolding practices. This study highlights the contribution of the heutagogical perspective to advance research on the participation and agency of students with SEN in mainstream schools.