Manifestations of metacognitive thinking in Engineering students: analysis of a didactic intervention in Physics teaching

Abstract

Nowadays, education faces the challenge of teaching students to seek knowledge, developing mechanisms that favor learning and student autonomy. In this sense, it is understood that teaching strategies that promote metacognitive thinking can promote improvements in the teaching and learning processes. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how an activity guide script provided moments of manifestations of metacognitive thinking in engineering students. For this, a didactic proposal was developed in the classroom, where in groups, the students worked to solve the problem situations presented in the guide script, using experimental and technological resources. For data collection, audio and field diary recordings were made by the researchers, in addition to the metacognitive questionnaire applied at the end of the activity. The data analysis, based on the theoretical framework used to prepare the educational intervention, was carried out observing the following actions: the conduction of the activity, which included the way the activity was presented (guide script), the organization of the groups, the availability of resources, and the students' actions when facing the activity.  In the results we can see that the group activity provided exchanges that contributed to metacognitive awareness; the materials provided allowed the students to observe and build upon the concepts explored; the stimuli presented throughout the activity by the teacher helped in the construction and evaluation of the strategies used by the groups. At the end of the activity, the students were able to identify which aspects facilitated or hindered the learning process, which are indicative of metacognitive awareness. It is noteworthy that there are still few studies that observe didactic proposals, which is an important field of study.