Page 232 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

scenario, the production de ciency, it is important that teachers motivate their
students to use metacognitive strategies, which can be done by providing them
with challenging assignments that force them to use these strategies. As discussed
above, assignments that involve authentic inquiry can ful ll this role. In the rst
scenario, the availability de ciency, teachers can play an important role by teaching metacognitive strategies. ere are many methods of metacognition instruction
that have proven to be e ective. One example is the use of questions that provoke
critical re ection during a learning task, which can be anything from reading a
di cult text to conducting an experiment (e.g., Chinn & Brown, 2002). Following
the stages of self-regulation as described in the beginning of this paragraph, these
questions can be asked by the teacher rst, and through a process of modelling
and sca olding students can then learn to ask these questions themselves. Other
examples of metacognitive strategy instruction are teaching students to check
on themselves, set goals, and plan their studies. In a similar way, there are many
cognitive strategies that can be taught by explicit instruction, modelling, and
sca olding, such as taking notes, summarising texts, seeking information, critical
thinking, and problem solving. From Chapter 6 we know that teachers mainly try
to teach metacognitive and cognitive skills by designing a learning environment
that should provoke these skills, e.g., by giving students the freedom to plan their
own work and increasing the amount of study material they have to learn for a
test, but rarely explicitly instruct students about these strategies. A possible reason
for this may be that they assume a production de ciency in students, whereas for
a substantial number of students an availability de ciency may be the problem.
Moreover, teachers may not know how to teach (meta)cognitive strategies. It
would be useful to investigate to what extent this is covered in teacher education.
If it were found to be lacking or of insu cient quality, measures for improvement 8 could be taken.
Many student beliefs contribute to or undermine the development of self-regulation, such as self-e cacy beliefs, having a growth or a xed mindset, and epistemological beliefs. We will focus on self-e cacy beliefs here, as self- e cacy was a main construct throughout this thesis and Chapter 7 revealed that self-e cacy contributed to self-regulation, in line with previous research (e.g., Bou ard-Bouchard et al., 1991). Moreover, just as Schraw, Crippen, and Hartley’s (2006) review pointed to the importance of paying attention to student beliefs in order to promote self-regulation, Schunk and Ermter (2000) even recommended to address self-e cacy and self-regulation as a whole, because they have a mutual
Conclusion and discussion
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