Page 231 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
Inquiry-based learning improves self-regulation by stimulating active engagement in the learning process: As inquiry revolves around posing questions, proposing hypotheses, testing them systematically, and evaluating the results, students are forced to use cognitive and metacognitive strategies to monitor their understanding. e role of the teacher is to facilitate this process through sca olded instruction, modelling re ective thinking, and encouraging students to take an active role in their learning. For inquiry learning to be e ective in promoting self-regulation it is crucial that the inquiry activities are authentic. Authentic inquiry, as opposed to simple inquiry, implies that students themselves are involved in all phases of the scienti c method (i.e., from generating questions to interpreting the ndings) instead of the teacher providing students with pre-formulated questions and pre-set experiments (Chinn & Malhorta, 2002). Authentic inquiry-based instruction leads to improved learning and increased motivation (Anderson, 2002). In Chapter 6, half of the teachers mentioned teaching research skills and an attitude of inquiry. Most of these teachers were science teachers. Some teachers explicitly mentioned teaching practices that can be classi ed as inquiry learning, although unfortunately not all of these would be classi ed as authentic inquiry learning. Teachers should be made more aware of the importance of inquiry learning, especially teachers of non-science subjects for which this type of learning is less common. is would contribute to students’ self-regulation skills through increasing their cognition, metacognition, and motivation. Also, it should be emphasised that inquiry learning is most e ective when it is authentic. Both teacher education programmes as well as professional development courses for teachers can play a role here.
Metacognition contributes to achievement partly independent of intelligence (Veenman, Kok, & Blöte, 2005), which implies that the most intelligent students are not necessarily the students with the best metacognitive skills. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 5, the students with the highest academic motivation (i.e., the intellectually engaged) were not the ones who showed the best use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Veenman, Kok, and Blöte (2005) pointed to two possible problems in students with low use of metacognition: an availability de ciency and a production de ciency. e rst is the case when students do not know how to use metacognitive strategies; the latter refers to students who know how to use them but simply do not do so, for example because they have never needed to use them because they have always succeeded in getting good marks without having to put a lot of e ort into their learning. In the second
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