2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Self-directed learning requires students engage deeply in all three metacognitive dimensions: Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluating. While instructors may currently integrate different activities in courses that provide the opportunity for students’ metacognitive engagement, they might not draw students into thinking deeply. For new engineering educators, it might be challenging to select activities that could provide opportunity for sufficient student engagement in metacognition. The purpose of the study was to investigate pairing self-evaluation and self-reflection activities by classifying students’ use of the metacognitive strategies and the highest levels to which students enacted these strategies. Data collection took place in a junior-level process engineering course in Spring 2021 at a large Midwest University. The present work used students’ self-evaluations of their computational work and reflections on their learning for four assignments associated with the second unit of the course. A simple text analysis of the self-evaluation and reflection responses revealed that students wrote more text for the self-evaluations than for the reflections. A revised a priori coding scheme was used to code students’ self-evaluation comments and reflection responses for the different metacognitive strategies and levels. Results showed that across all four assignments, students were predominantly engaged in the Evaluating strategy during self-evaluation, whereas they predominantly engaged in Planning and Monitoring in the reflection activity. Student engagement was at the low and medium levels of the three metacognitive strategies.

Keywords: junior, reflection, metacognition, qualitative