2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Metacognition refers to the self-regulation process that learners can use to measure their own understanding and, thus, how effectively they are studying. Developing metacognition has been shown to help students perform better academically. Yet instructors do not habitually refer to these skills and ensure that students develop their metacognition. These skills are especially important in conceptual problem-solving courses in Engineering that require new study strategies that students are not familiar with. In this paper, we explore the extent to which students are aware of their metacognitive skills and whether an intervention can help students improve. We surveyed students in three second-year Engineering courses that deal with conceptual problem solving: Discrete Math, Analog Signal Processing, and Conservation principles. We used a shortened version of the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) originally developed by Schraw and Dennison (1994). The shortened version was developed by Harrison and Vallin (2017) and assesses students along two dimensions: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition.

We posed the following research questions:

RQ1: In our classes, what do students report on the shortened MAI and are there metrics where students are stronger or weaker?

RQ2: Are there differences between the courses in students’ reports on the shortened MAI?

RQ3: How does their self-assessment on the MAI correlate with course performance?

RQ4: Does explicit coverage of metacognition strategies during lecture help students improve their metacognition?

During Fall 2024 we surveyed over 1000 students in Discrete Math, Analog Signal Processing, and Conservation principles, first and second year courses in the School of Engineering at a large state University. We surveyed students using the shortened version of the (MAI) on metacognitive aspects such as: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, planning, information management strategies, monitoring, evaluation, and debugging strategies. Additionally, we conducted metacognitive strategy interventions in our courses. The intervention was done in the lecture where metacognition strategies and metacognition regulation were discussed with students. Additionally, the instructors reinforced these strategies in lectures throughout the semester to remind students of the concepts and model the behaviors.

Preliminary results indicate that students are metacognitively aware and might overestimate their self-regulation abilities. We found that students rate high on debugging strategies and lowest on planning. We plan to survey students at the end of the semester and analyze the responses together with course performance. We plan to look for patterns in the data to examine differences between midterm grades and final grades and how they are correlated with measures in the MAI and in changes between the two times that the survey was administered. We also plan to look at differences between classes. We plan to use this to design future interventions specifically tailored to our courses. We hope that our methodology will be easy to implement and useful to instructors of other conceptual problem-solving classes.