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Advancing Learning Lab

Investigating the Impact of Metacognitive Supports on Students’ Mathematics Knowledge and Motivation in MATHia

Overview

Drawing from our past research in middle school classrooms (Zepeda et al., 2015; Zepeda et al., 2019), this project aims to investigate the impact of supporting middle school students’ metacognitive skills during mathematics learning within the UpGrade/MATHia platform on middle school students’ metacognitive skills, mathematics knowledge, and motivation. In particular, we focus on supporting three metacognitive skills: planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Planning refers to identifying how to reach a goal, monitoring entails assessing one’s understanding and progress toward that goal and evaluating refers to assessing the process of goal attainment. Although metacognition has shown to have many positive impacts on student learning and motivation, students rarely receive instruction on when, how, or why to apply these skills. This work aims to alleviate that void in their educational trajectories by leveraging the use of digital learning platforms.

Project Team

Senior Personel: Drs. Cristina Zepeda (PI), Kelley Durkin (Co-PI), Bethany Rittle-Johnson (Co-I)

Graduate Student Researchers: Xinran (Wendy) Wang and Siyu (Serena) Luo

Status

We begin piloting in Summer 2024.

Funding

This work is supported by  by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N240024 to Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. Specifically, this project is supported by National Center for Education Research (NCER) within the IES to contribute to networks under the Research Networks Focused on Critical Problems of Education Policy and Practice program (84.305N) as a Research Team to join the Digital Learning Platforms (DLPs) to Enable Efficient Education Research Network, SEERNet and  to conduct research with UpGrade/MATHia (Carnegie Learning), one of the Digital Learning Platforms.