Effects of self-created metacognitive prompts on learning process and learning performance

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Maria Bannert
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2011 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 197782705

Research in the field of self-regulated learning in computer-based learning environments often reveals that students do not learn in a strategic and goal-oriented manner. Therefore, research has investigated interventions that shall foster strategic learning processes and as a result of that enhance the learning outcome. One promising kind of intervention that has been tested in numerous experimental studies are prompts given throughout the learning process. Prompts are resented to the students, e.g. in a pop-up window, require the learners to reflect on their own learning process or even ask for the execution of a (metacognitive) learning strategy. Despite of the positive effects of prompts the studies do also show that many students do not comply with the prompts in an appropriate manner. Asking them about the prompts reveals that they feel restricted in their autonomy by the prompts. In this project we want to foster the experience of autonomy and thus improve the compliance with the prompts using a new kind of prompting, that is, students shall create their own metacognitive prompts. We want to investigate if such self-created metacognitive prompts have positive effects on the learning process and the learning outcome. We expect that self-created metacognitive prompts are more effective than conventional metacognitive prompts. To test these assumption two experimental studies are planned using self-created metacognitive prompts. The experiments will not only help to optimize the prompting technique but will also extend theoretical models about promoting student's metacognition in computer-based learning environments.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants