Research On Metacognition Behaviors In Solving Geographical Problems Of Senior High School Students

Developing students' problem-solving ability has already been concerned by educators,and metacognition is one of the most necessary mental components for successful problem solving.However,the absence of metacognition cultivation in high school geography curriculum is quite common.Teachers rarely develop teaching interventions that use metacognitive components.Therefore,30 senior high school students in Shanghai were evaluated by using the way of think-aloud protocol,solving a real-life geography problem.The Metacognitive Awareness Scale was used to measure the students' level of metacognition.The coding scheme was used to describe and analyze the differences in students' metacognitive behaviors during geographic problem solving.It is found that:(1)metacognition can influence problem solving process and outcome.In the process of solving geographic problems,two dimensions of metacognitive knowledge,"task" and "strategy" play an overarching role in the problem solving process.The "task" component significantly influenced problem solving scores.Three components of metacognitive monitoring,namely,"monitoring" "debugging strategies" and "information management strategies" also played a major role.(2)There exists differences in metacognitive components during geographic problem solving among groups.In terms of metacognitive awareness,the overall level of students in the high and middle ability groups was higher than that in the low ability group.And three dimensions of "task" "information management strategies" and "debugging strategies" exist significant differences.In terms of the frequency of metacognitive behaviors,metacognitive regulation was more frequent than metacognitive knowledge,and the three groups showed significant differences only in the "task" dimension.(3)Metacognition can compensate for academic level deficits and therefore promotes successful problem solving.Academic level was not significantly related to problem solving scores,while the metacognitive component "task" was shown to significantly affect.Based on the results,the proposed teaching interventions for the development of metacognition in problem solving are(1)metacognitive prompts using list of heuristic questions,(2)verbal metacognitive prompts,and(3)enhanced metacognitive training in problem solving contexts.