(445b) Epistemic Metacognitive Reflection on Concept Questions in Active Learning

Many engineering problems assigned in undergraduate classes are numerical and are solved using equations and algorithms. Concept questions, which can be administered in class using active learning pedagogies, aid in the development of conceptual understanding as opposed to the procedural skill often emphasized in numerical problems. The effectiveness of concept questions is often assessed based on the correctness of students’ answers. In the literature, student thinking has been probed via their explanations of their answers, and metacognition—students’ thinking about their own thinking—has been investigated based on their self-reported confidence. In this work, we are interested in students’ epistemic metacognition, or their thinking about their own knowledge and learning, in response to concept questions. We administer a concept question to over 300 students in six courses taught at six diverse institutions and find no statistically significant differences in answer correctness or confidence between the classes. We assess epistemic metacognition by asking students whether the question made them think deeply about the course material, and why. Across the classes, students consistently report that they are not accustomed to such non-numerical concept questions, but they grapple in different ways with the experience. Some students frame engineering as inherently numerical, and thus do not value the conceptual understanding assessed by the question, while others recognize that developing conceptual knowledge is useful and will translate to their future engineering work. We conclude that groups of students with similar levels of conceptual understanding may differ in another dimension of learning: their epistemological framing of engineering problems. We discuss the ways in which the differences in teaching methods used by the six instructors in this study may have contributed to the differences in their students’ epistemic metacognition.