Date

2008-01-01

Author

Topcu, Abdullah
Ubuz, Behiye

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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This paper researches the effects that students' metacognitive knowledge has on their participation in online forum discussions, which form part of a web-based asynchronous course based on a constructivist instructional approach. Metacognitive knowledge increases learners' ability to be independent learners, which is an indispensable characteristic of the distant learner. The study was carried out with 32 third-grade pre-service teachers. Each message in the forum discussions was analyzed in terms of interaction types identified by McKinnon ( 2000) and also scored using a grading rubric developed by the researchers. The metacognitive knowledge of the pre-service teachers was measured by the component of the General Metacognition Questionnaire. Sixty-seven percent of the pre-service teachers were at the high or medium-to-high metacognitive knowledge level and mostly sent messages having "example to idea," "clarification and elaboration," or "idea to example" type interactions. Pre-service teachers who exhibited low metacognitive knowledge, however, mostly forwarded messages having " acknowledgments," " unsubstantiated judgment," or "thoughtful query" type interactions. Moreover, metacognitive knowledge of the pre-service teachers uniquely explained 21.4% of the variance in the online participation score. We concluded by outlining some implications metacognitive knowledge has on forum discussions in relation to the constructivist approach.

Subject Keywords

Metacognitive knowledge, Constructivist approach, Online participation, Interaction

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/54448

Collections

Department of Mathematics and Science Education, Article