Examining Intentional Knowing Among Secondary School Students: Through the Lens of Metacognition
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Examining Intentional Knowing Among Secondary School Students: Through the Lens of Metacognition Chwee Beng Lee
Published online: 17 November 2012 Ó De La Salle University 2012
Abstract In this study, we examine intentional knowing through the lens of metacognition. Learners are not just active in their construction of meaning, but they can also be intentional. This would mean that they are cognitively engaged in the learning process, monitoring and regulating their learning. To learn intentionally, students must consciously understand and be able to define their strengths and weaknesses, their learning processes, how they examine the way they execute learning tasks, monitor learning, evaluate learning, and whether they innovate in order to learn intentionally. The two main purposes of this study are to examine whether the IKIS (revised MAI) is able to provide a six-factor solution to explain intentional knowing and to predict the influences of age and intellectual ability on students’ intentional knowing. This study involved 732 secondary school students, and several statistical analyses such as exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were performed. A six-factor solution was generated and the implications of this study are discussed. Keywords Intentional learning Intentional knowing Metacognition Factor analysis
Introduction The importance of metacognition in learning is unquestionable. Researchers have found that metacognition is related to intellectual skills (Veenman et al. 2005), problem solving (Mayer 1998; Lee and Teo 2011), critical thinking C. B. Lee (&) School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
(Choy and Cheah 2009; Kuhn and Dean 2004; Magno 2010), and motivation (Sungur and Senler 2009). Despite the numerous studies conducted on metacognition and the amount of attention given to it, metacognition remains an elusive construct. There is no single explanation of what exactly being metacognitive or cognitive is, and different researchers tend to define metacognition and its components differently (Zohar and David 2009). There are also great efforts to develop instruments and methods to examine and measure metacognition (see Pintrich et al. 1991; Weinstein et al. 1987; Tobias and Everson 2000, 2002). Regardless of such attempts, we still do not fully comprehend the nature of metacognition, its components, or its functionality. With regard to the use of self-reports, reliability is an issue, as participants may not always provide truthful responses. Despite their flaws, self-reported inventories are perhaps the least problematic technique and they are still a relatively effective way of teasing out participants’ metacognition (Sperling et al. 2002). Lee et al. (2010) studied pre-service teachers’ metacognition and argued that obtaining such a profile was crucial to the design and implementation of teacher preparatory programs within a diverse population comprising pre-service teachers of different ethnicities. Des
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