EOS-SEI: research

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Can Critical Incidence Questionnaires support development of metacognitive skills?

Questions or Goals

Critical Incidence Questionnaires (CIQs) have been used for a couple of years, but in spite of literature promoting their use, we are not sure if they help students make measurable gains in metacognitive abilities. We are not even sure how to measure increases in metacognition. This project is an exploration of both those questions in the context of our Environmental Sciences course ENVR200.

Implementation

CIQs are answered weekly by all students. These reponses are being coded with a view to exploring which questions, and which contexts, cause students to think about their thinking.

People (contacts)

Sara Harris is P.I. on this project
Douw Steyn is lead instructor in the course
Francis Jones (STLF in EOS).
Kim Smet is a recently graduated student who is working on the qualitative data analysis

Progress

Fall 2007: CIQs first used in the course.
Fall 2008: An initial presentation about the use of CIQs was presented at the UBC Celebrate Learning conference. A poster on background research, and possibilities for investigating metacognition using CIQs, was presented at a workshop entitled "The role of metacognition in teaching geoscience".
Summer 2009: Support from SkyLight was obtained to hire a student, and qualitative data analysis is under way. Over 1300 responses to CIQ questions are being coded and analyzed.

Products (papers, presentations, etc)

Presentation (PDF) about CIQs (Oct 2008).
Poster Improving Metacognitive Skills of 2nd year Environmental Science Students: What to Measure? (PDF), F. Jones, S. Harris, D. Steyn, delivered at the workshop entitled "The role of metacognition in teaching geoscience". For publically available outcomes of this workshop see link here.

Intentions

We hope to learn more about exactly what contribution CIQ's can make for students who are required to answer them every week throughout a course.
We also hope to learn about the impact of CIQs on students' developing metacognitive skills.

Anticipated benefits to undergraduate learning

The outcomes of this project will guide how we chose to present and implement CIQs, and how we support students in developing their metacognitive skills.