Metacognition, Error Management And Academic Achievement Of Middle School Students

Metacognition is a super mental-skill that is important to improve the awareness of learning goals,implement of learning strategies and transferring. Many literatures illustrate that there is a positive correlation between metacognition and achievement. Metacognition can be improved by effective instruction. Error management belongs to individual knowledge management.Errors often occur in study, which brings the most valueable feedback message for the students.So to manage errors will help to improve performance.During the research, the means of measurement,interview and works analysis were applied .The research tool called "questionnaire of metacognition" was made by Wang-ling from Capital Normal University. While the questionnaire of error management formulated on the base of former researches. The research includes 749 middle school students who are in municipal and common school from the city of Yantai. Multivariate analysis of variance was used. The paper analyzes the present state about mathematical metacognition and error management of contemporary middle school students, and explores the path that metacognition influences achievement through error management.The interview means is qualitative research around partial students who were measured. By interview, discussed were characteristics of mathematical metacognition and error management as well as the relation between them. Another qualitative research was analysis about error management works to find out the strategies and methods used for students, to demonstrate the relation of metacognition and error management.The conclusions are obtained as follow: (1) gender effect is significant in metacognition knowledge; the effects of both school and achievement level are significant in metacognition experience and skill. The whole metacognition is different among schools and among achievement levels. (2)The whole error management is different among schools, between genders and among achievement levels. So is the attitude to error management. Except that, different grades are also significantly different in both the value and the correct behavior of error management; the behavior of errors selection is different among schools and between genders; deep error management behavior is different among schools and among achievement levels. (3) The analysis of path model shows that error management can moderate metacognition and achievement. That testifies the hypothesis put forward in the research. There are two paths about the influence of mathematical metacognition to mathematic performance: one is that metacognition experience and skill directly effect, the other is that metacognition influences performance by error management indirectly. (4)The result of the qualitative research shows that the students who have a high metacognition can actively manage errors and apply corresponding strategies.The study is helpful to know the present state of error management, to find out the reason why the useness of errors is low in pratice. It also has theoretical and practical significances for students to learn easily and for teachers to teach effectively.