The relationship between metacognition and the ability to pose questions in chemical education

Abstract

Development of independent learners is an important science education objective. To achieve this, learners need to know what they know and what they should know, so they can be in control of their learning process. Question posing is a higher-order thinking skill, and as such it is linked to metacognitive knowledge. This chapter describes two related studies which investigate the effect of exposing high school chemistry students to a metacognitive tool for posing complex questions and developing reading strategies aimed at understanding adapted scientific articles. Our specially designed tool was found to improve students’ knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. The ability to pose complex questions, assisted by metacognitive knowledge, contributes to improvement of students’ understanding of chemical phenomena and scientific research. Combining our two studies and the metacognitive tool, we have developed and introduced a question complexity model that students and teachers alike can use for both generating and classifying questions. We also found relationship between a student’s high metacognitive knowledge and her/his ability to pose complex questions. The notion of metacognition applied in this chapter refers to students’ “knowledge of cognition” in the sense of their ability to identify the strategies they apply and to provide justifications for asking the questions they had posed. In addition, the chapter addresses three components of regulation of cognition: planning in advance how to approach future question-posing tasks, evaluating the questions students generated, and regulating/controlling future questions posing processes.