Award Date

May 2018

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Psychology & Higher Education

First Committee Member

Matthew Bernacki

Second Committee Member

CarolAnne Kardash

Third Committee Member

Alice Corkill

Fourth Committee Member

Jenifer Utz

Number of Pages

235

Abstract

The present study examined the effects of a classroom intervention on students’ metacognitive monitoring of retrieval practice performance feedback and metacognitive control of future study decisions. The sample included 103 undergraduate students enrolled in five sections of an introductory educational psychology course. A true experimental design was used to randomly assign students to trained (n=49) and control (n=54) conditions within each section.

During the semester, students completed a pre- and post- metacognitive awareness inventory (MAI), 10 practice-tests, 10 feedback monitoring assignments, and a cumulative final examination. The feedback assignments required students to identify areas of mastery (i.e., well-learned topics) and areas of weakness (i.e., yet-to-be-learned topics). In addition, students were asked to monitor the effectiveness of their current strategies (i.e., monitoring strategy use) and to select a study strategy for their examination preparation (i.e., control strategy decisions). The primary goals of this work were to examine whether training metacognitive monitoring and control skills for retrieval practice increases students' academic performance, their independent use of practice-testing, and the accuracy of the metacognitive monitoring judgments they make based on external feedback.

The results suggest that students who completed the metacognitive retrieval practice training scored higher on final exam items that were not previously quizzed, compared to the control group. Path analysis results and mediation tests showed that training influenced multiple additional factors, including metacognitive awareness for conditional knowledge, planning, and evaluation strategies, monitoring accuracy for well-learned and yet-to-be-learned topics, selection of targeted strategies for exam preparation, monitoring strategy use, control of strategy use, practice-test frequency, and use of course objectives. In addition, trained students continued

to repeatedly use practice-tests more often than the control group did over the course. An unanticipated finding was that training led to less frequent monitoring of performance as observed via the My Grades tool on the learning management system. This behavior was not explicitly discouraged during training.

In an overall mediation model, when all of the relations among metacognitive, control, and outcome variables were examined simultaneously, yet-to-be-learned monitoring accuracy had the strongest indirect effect of training on final examination performance for non-quizzed items. More specific models including individual endogenous factors demonstrated that yet-to-be-learned monitoring accuracy, well-learned monitoring accuracy, practice-test frequency, and monitoring of my grades each were induced by training and influenced final examination performance. These findings suggest that monitoring feedback accurately from practice-tests is important and can be improved with training.

Keywords

feedback; intervention; metacognitive monitoring; retrieval practice; training

Disciplines

Educational Psychology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Download


Share

COinS