| The concept of metacognition has been an important and influential development in the contemporary study of cognition. Literature has found that metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills distinguish good information processors form poor information processors, and good performers from poor performers. It was also documented that promoting metacognitive and strategic knowledge would enhance the learners' self-efficacy for positive attribution patterns.; Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the effects of short-term laboratory training that aimed at promoting learners' metacognitive and strategic knowledge and skills. The results of these studies however, were inadequate to be applied to the real classroom contexts. Literature has shown that due to the limited teacher-student interaction, the students in the large classes are especially vulnerable to passive learning patterns. This study examined the effects of a designed support system that included embedded metacognitive instruction and a student learning support system on the students' metacognitive awareness/skill, cognitive performance, self-efficacy, attribution, and motivation to learn in two large classes of an introductory statistics course at a large northeastern University.; This study was a 12-week investigation. This study recruited two instructors, four teaching assistants, and two hundred and forty-nine students in eight recitation groups. Based on the three-factor, nested, factorial design, the students were assigned to eight different treatment conditions. These conditions included the combinations of whether the students received the embedded metacognitive instruction from the instructor or the teaching assistant, or received the student learning support system.; The analysis of the findings had shown that the integration of the treatments, such as the embedded metacognitive instruction at both the instructor and teaching assistant levels and the learning support system, had positive effects on students' self-efficacy, metacognitive/awareness, and cognitive performance. The between-class analysis of overall effects showed that the treatments had significant impact on the students' metacognitive awareness/skills, attribution pattern, motivation to learn, and self-efficacy. Finally, this study revealed several important issues regarding the implementation process of such support system for both teacher and students. |
