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Discussion As hypothesized, the
perceived usefulness of metacognitive strategies and their interaction were
significant, positive predictors of students’ plausible values in reading,
mathematics, and science and corroborated some of the findings discussed in
Jacobs and Paris (1987), Kramarski and Mizrachi
(2004), and Zion, Michalsky, and Mevarech (2005).
Holding everything else constant, the results suggest that the
perceived usefulness of metacognitive strategies account for a significant
proportion of variability in 15-year-old students’ plausible values reading,
math and science competencies in the United States. The perceived usefulness of summarizing strategies
(METASUM) seemed to make the largest contribution in all three models. According to Schunk
(2008), students with high levels of metacognitive ability have the skills
needed to regulate, rehearse and organize new information that needs to be
learned as well as the ability to monitor their understanding during the
process of encoding that new information.
In notion with Schunk (2008), summarizing or
the ability to rehearse and organize new information in an individual’s own
words may tap into more higher-order thinking than understanding and
remembering (UNDREM). The results of
the current study coincide with the findings of Kaur and Areepattamannil
(2012) that suggest students benefit more from using metacognitive strategies
than by simply trying memorize information. The perceived usefulness of metacognitive strategies
did not differ across criteria. This
result contradicts that found by Vo et al. (2014) that suggests that
children’s metacognition is domain specific; however, it is important to note
that Vo et al. used a sample of 5-year-old children and the current study’s
sample consisted of 15-year-olds. Pilten and Yener (2010) that
suggest metacognitive knowledge evolves over time. Similarly, Krebs and Roebers (2012) showed that although 9 to 10-year-old
children and 11 to 12-year-old children showed adequate metacognitive
processes during a test, the older children outperformed the younger during
retrieval processes. Perhaps
15-year-old students are better equipped to transfer metacognitive abilities
across domains, as the current study suggests. Given
the differences in metacognitive abilities in different age groups, the
results of the current study may not be generalizable to populations of
different age or schools in countries other than the United States. Also, the effect of the perceive usefulness
of metacognitive strategies is likely to differ from the effect of efficiency
or frequency of use. It is possible
that the effect of the perceived usefulness of metacognitive strategies would
be underestimated compared to that of the efficient or frequent use of
metacognitive strategies. That being
said, it remains unclear how the perceived usefulness of metacognitive
strategies as assessed by PISA compare to other measures of
metacognition. Furthermore, this study
relied on students’ plausible values and not test scores, and the effect of
the perceived usefulness of metacognitive strategies across different
outcomes has yet to be explored. Future
experiments should utilize structural equation modeling to aggregate
plausible values into overall proficiency scores based on the imputation
theory of Rubin (1987) to assess the perceived usefulness of metacognitive
strategies on latent, overall academic literacy. Metacognitive researchers would benefit
from the creation of non-self reported measure of
metacognition to ensure the validity of future experiments. |
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