Monitoring and control metacognitive in solving problems in physics: analysis of a comparative study

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate the activity of pencil-paper problem solving regarding the importance of providing students with moments of awareness about their knowledge, stimulation of monitoring, and exercise of control over actions. Particularly, the study seeks to assess academic performance of high school students in pencil-paper problem solving situations, guided by instructions that require them to recreate the title and illustrate the problem using their previous knowledge. The theoretical basis is linked to the introduction of metacognitive learning strategies as potential aid for students in understanding and solving Physics problems. The qualitative investigation seeks to analyze and compare two classes of the first year of high school - one class was instructed to use metacognitive thinking and the other one was not - regarding their academic performances faced with four classic kinematics problems. The results indicate that the didactic proposal involving the use of metacognitive learning strategies is more efficient in terms of student dialog with the problems presented aiming to solve them, and the number of right answers in the questions proposed.