2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Increasing emphasis on higher-order thinking skills in the engineering workplace has shifted instructors' focus toward the integration of activities in their courses that promote students' learning and thinking skills. Reflection is one such tool that assists students’ learning through metacognitive engagement, where students regulate their cognition with the use of three strategies: Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluating. Therefore, reflection has been widely accepted in professional courses such as medicine and is currently finding its place in engineering classrooms. As reflection is a complex process, instructors provide prompts to guide students' engagement in reflection. But questions arise: Do engineering students understand the characteristics of reflection? Do students need more instructional support their engaging with reflection? In-depth exploration of students’ metacognitive engagement can shed light on students' understanding of reflection.
The purpose of this work was to examine students' use of metacognitive strategies while responding to their weekly reflection assignments The study aimed to address the research question: What were the students’ levels of engagement with the three metacognitive strategies while reflecting on their weekly assignments of the course?
The study was set in principles of environmental engineering course offered by civil engineering department in Spring 2023 at research-intensive US Midwestern University. The total number of students enrolled in the course was N=22, there were 20 study participants. Students self-evaluated their weekly assignment using a standard solution key and responded to three reflection prompts. Data from assignments in the third and tenth week were qualitatively analyzed using a modified a priori coding scheme consisting of three dimensions: Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluating. Each metacognitive dimension consists of three or four elements. Monitoring consists of four elements: Difficulty, Experience, Identification, and Standard. Evaluation consists of three elements: Action, Assessment, and Change in thinking, and Planning consists of four elements: Goal, Action, Justification, or Transfer. Each element was assessed for level of detail (i.e., none, vague, and sufficiently). Bar graphs were plotted to present the students' level of engagement in each element of three metacognitive strategies on each reflection.
Overall, when comparing the third- and tenth-week reflections, results showed that a majority of students remained at the vague level for all three metacognitive strategies. These results imply that students were engaged at a superficial level during reflection, primarily due to a lack of detail in the form of evidence for claims they are making about their learning. Recommendations for how instructors can provide support that aims to improve students’ level of engagement with metacognitive strategies are provided.