The Impact of Topic-Specific vs. Generic Self-reflection on Students’ Metacognitive Abilities, Conceptual Understanding, and Problem-Solving Strategies

To become proficient in problem solving, science and engineering students must develop sufficient metacognitive abilities, as these facilitate self-regulation of the problem-solving processes. The Disciplinary Learning Companion (DLC) aims to promote students’ engagement in metacognition through reflection on the solving-process that is elicited by discipline- or even topic-specific reflective prompts. A previous quasi-experimental study compared the impact of the DLC on students’ academic achievement with a more generic reflection tool, referred to as the Learning Companion (LC), and yielded results in favour of the DLC. The current contribution investigates whether the observed difference in impact on academic achievement can be attributed to a difference in impact on students’ metacognitive abilities and/or conceptual understanding. To this end, we analyse students’ written solution to an exam problem and assess their conceptual understanding of the problem and their strategic approach to solve it, using the latter as a proxy for metacognitive abilities. By relating students’ conceptual understanding and strategic approach to their interaction with the LC or DLC, we find a significant difference in impact on conceptual understanding, in favour of the DLC. However, no significant difference was found for students’ strategic approach to problem solving. This indicates that the difference in impact on students’ academic achievement can be explained mainly by a difference in impact on conceptual understanding.