Ideas for 21st Century Education

Proceedings of the Asian Education Symposium (AES 2016), November 22-23, 2016, Bandung, Indonesia

Ade Gafar Abdullah, Ida Hamidah, Siti Aisyah, Ari Arifin Danuwijaya, Galuh Yuliani, Heli S.H. Munawaroh

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138053434
• eBook ISBN: 9781351680387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Ideas for 21st Century Education contains the papers presented at the Asian Education Symposium (AES 2016), held on November 22—23, 2016, in Bandung, Indonesia. The book covers 11 topics:

1. Art Education (AED)
2. Adult Education (ADE)
3. Business Education (BED)
4. Course Management (CMT)
5. Curriculum, Research and Development (CRD)
6. Educational Foundations (EDF)
7. Learning / Teaching Methodologies and Assessment (TMA)
8. Global Issues in Education and Research (GER)
9. Pedagogy (PDG)
10. Ubiquitous Learning (UBL)
11. Other Areas of Education (OAE)

Learning Teaching Methodologies and Assessment (TMA)

The relationship between metacognitive skills and students’ achievement analyzed using problem based learning

B. Milama, N.A. Damayanti & D. Murniati

Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta, Indonesia

ABSTRACT: The aims of this study were to reveal the effects of problem based learning on metacognitive skills and academic achievement, to analyze the metacognitive skills and academic achievement according to gender, and to discuss the correlation between metacognitive skills and academic achievement profiles. Students’ metacognitive skills were measured with Metacognitive Activity Inventory (MCA-I) that was developed by Cooper and Urena (2008), while a chemistry achievement test was undertaken to measure the students’ academic performance. A quantitative method was adapted to examine the results. Parametric t-test and Pearson Correlation Coefficient were used for data analysis. As result of analyzing the data, it can be concluded that problem based learning contributed positively both on students’ metacognitive skills and students’ academic achievement. Furthermore, significant correlation at the level of 0.01 exposed the relationship between metacognitive skills and students’ achievement. According to gender, female students scored higher than males, both in MCA-I and the achievement test.

1 INTRODUCTION

High school students face an unpredictable future in which the skills and knowledge they require are constantly changing. This presents an interesting challenge to students and their teachers. Accordingly, a common theme throughout many statements about the purpose of education in the twenty-first century is the need to develop lifelong learners. Meta-cognitive skills play an important role in allowing students to become lifelong learners, because they affect how they can apply what they have learned to solve problems (Rompayom, 2010).

The basic definition of metacognition is a process of what somebody does to monitor their thoughts or their cognitive domain (Flavel, 1979). In fact, metacognitive includes how to reflect the known, how to analyze what is taught, how to solve what is analyzed, and how to apply what is learned (Tosun & Senocak, 2013). According to Livingston (2003), metacognitive is separated into three activities: planning, which has something to do with one’s connection to their previous knowledge; monitoring, which involves one’s self-checking at each stage of the task; and evaluating, which includes the learner’s appraisal of the outcome and reflection on what new knowledge he or she has gained. These three aspects are commonly known as metacognitive skills.

Metacognitive skills are specifically defined as self-assessment, which is about the students’ ability to access their own cognition, and self-management, which is related to the students’ ability to regulate their own cognitive development (River, 2001). Metacognitive skills play important roles in the learning process. They refer to students’ cognition features while solving a problem. In the process of problem solving, students use many cognitive awareness behaviors, such as conceiving the problem, determining how to solve it, and analyzing and evaluating the process. Therefore, the process of problem solving improves students’ awareness in the learning process (Gay & Howard, 2000). However, the more often that students use their metacognitive skills, the better academic performance they will achieve (Young & Fry, 2008).

Based on this fact, it is obviously required that educators recognize the importance of providing learning strategies that encourage students to develop their metacognitive skills. In the literature, it can be seen that student-centered learning has a relatively more significant effect on improving students’ metacognitive skills compared to the traditional teaching methods (Ning & Downing, 2010). In a study carried out by Celiker (2015), Problem Based Learning (PBL) has a positive effect on the development of students’ metacognitive skills.

PBL is the leading method among student-centered strategies and provides individuals with self-learning and lifelong learning skills, developing metacognitive skills and helping them to find alternative solutions to the problems they face or might face in daily life (Tosun & Senocak, 2013). The basis of PBL is rooted in Dewey’s learning by doing and experiencing. The PBL is an active learning method, which enables the student to become aware of and determine his/her problem-solving ability and learning needs, to be able to make knowledge operative and to perform group works in the face of real life problems. It provides students with opportunities to consider how the facts that they acquire relate to the specific problem at hand. It also obligates them to ask what they need to know (Silver, 2004). Moreover, by having students learn through this experience of solving problems, they can learn both contents and thinking strategies. However, it will enable students to engage in complex tasks requiring higher-level thinking skills in order to support their academic achievements. Thus, metacognitive skills can be trained to the students to support their learning success.

According to the explanation above, this study clearly has three questions to answer: (1) Does problem based learning have any effect on meta-cognitive skills and academic performance? (2) Do metacognitive and academic performance posttest scores vary according to gender? (3) What is the correlation between metacognitive skills and academic performance?

2 RESEARCH METHODS

2.1 Research design

In this study, the research design employed is a post-test only with control group. In this design, the effect of problem based learning is tested on two different groups, which are separated into experimental and control groups. In the learning process, both of the groups had different treatment. PBL is used in the experimental group, while conventional learning is used in the control group (Creswell, 2012).

2.2 Study group

The research groups of the study comprised 76 eleventh-grade students of a state senior high school in Tangerang Selatan, in which both the experimental and control groups consisted of 38 students. Examining the gender distribution of the control group, 13 (34.21%) of them are males and 25 (65.79%) of them are females. While the gender distribution of the experimental group is not much different to the other one, it consists of 11 (28.95%) males and 27 (71.05%) females.

2.3 Assessment instrument

As part of the research to determine the metacognitive skills, the “Metacognitive Activity Inventory” test designed by Cooper et al. (2008) was used. The test has 27 questions, which includes 12 statements of planning skills, 13 statements of monitoring skills, and 2 statements of evaluation skills. On the other hand, the chemistry achievement test, which consists of 20 questions, was undertaken to examine students’ cognitive and academic performance.

2.4 Data analysis

The data were analyzed via SPSS 21 packet program and Microsoft excel. To examine the normal distribution range in both the experimental and control classes, the lilliefors test was used and the L value of the test results were 0.11 and 0.09. Since values higher than 0.05 were interpreted as suitable, there was no deviance from normal distribution on this significance level; homogeneity test, promoting Fisher test, was used to examine students from both groups with no difference. The value found that the two sample groups were at the same level. According to the t-test result, the value was found to be 7.89, however, this result can be described that there are positive effects of PBL on dependent variables of the research. In other words, it can be concluded that null hypothesis is obviously rejected. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to examine the relationship between metacognitive and academic achievement.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The t-test results conducted on the significance of the distinction between the posttest scores of the experimental and control groups of metacognitive skills and the chemistry academic achievement test are given in Table 1.

This finding has shown that problem based learning has an important effect on increasing the metacognitive skills and academic performance.

Blakey and Spence (1990) determined metacognitive behavioral development strategies as defining what one knows and does not know, thinking by speaking, keeping a diary, planning, organizing and summarizing. Revising all the steps of this strategy it has shown that it is parallel in many ways to the problem based learning steps that are applied during this study. The implemented steps of this study were influenced by Arends (2012), which consisted of five steps. It began with making students familiar with the problem, organizing students to study, assisting independent and group investigation, developing artifacts (learning outcome), and analyzing and evaluating the problem-solving process (reflecting). However, through all these steps students are encouraged to develop their thinking skills process, implement previous information to solve the problems and to organize and remember new ways of creating knowledge by solving problems. This kind of opportunity becomes important because it will help them to enhance their metacognitive skills and improve their cognitive processes, which will further turn them into students that gained a better academic performance. Hence, the improvement in metacognitive skills will be followed by every skill in metacognitive itse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Organizing committees
• Adult Education (ADE)
• Art Education (AED)
• Business Education (BED)
• Course Management (CMT)
• Curriculum, Research and Development (CRD)
• Educational Foundation (EDF)
• Global Issues in Education and Research (GER)
• Learning Teaching Methodologies and Assessment (TMA)
• Other Areas of Education (OAE)
• Pedagogy (PDG)
• Ubiquitous Learning (UBL)
• Author index