The role of metacognitive skills in learning to solve problems

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forward. The most important one is that students in the model condition
outperform their peers from the no-model condition concerning
knowledge acquisition and transfer. Furthermore it is hypothesized that
students in the no-model condition compensate for the lack of the KM
model with respect to knowledge acquisition and transfer by using their
metacognitive skills insofar as they are available.
Forty-six students from the ‘Hogeschool Zuyd’ participated in this
study in Autumn 2004. They were randomly assigned to teams and
conditions. The sample was comparable to the other samples in the
previous studies.
KMQUESTions was used in order to measure knowledge acquisition.
An additional part of KMQUESTions was developed specifically to measure
transfer of knowledge. Metacognition was measured in three ways:
the scale Metacognitive self-regulation of the MSLQ was used both proand
retrospectively and the coding scheme that was developed in study
I was taken as a starting point for performing protocol analysis, which
represents a concurrent measurement.
The results indicate that, next to the fact that students learn from
KM Quest in each condition, in the model condition students gain more
model-specific knowledge than students who do not have the model available.
However, students in the model condition need almost twice as
much time in order to accomplish this result and they heavily focus on
the KM model. Students in the no-model condition also show a learning
effect on model-specific knowledge. They develop an ‘intuitive’ task
model.
The results on the retrospective self-report measure suggest that the
collaborative environment might induce the free-rider effect. Students
who report infrequent use of metacognitive skills gain more knowledge.
The explanation that is put forward states that metacognitively ‘low’
students may hitch a ride on the efforts of their peers, thus gaining a lot
of knowledge from them without having to put in the effort themselves.
The concurrent measurement provides some evidence that when a
task model is present in the learning environment, metacognitive skills
are of lesser importance for knowledge acquisition. Without the KM
model, knowledge acquisition is related to the amount of metacognitive
contributions in the communication protocols. It is also suggested that
the nature of regulation changes depending on the presence of the model.
The inclusion of a task model induces the need to regulate the use of
that model instead of regulating activities at the object-level.
With respect to these different measurements of metacognition, the
results of this study imply that it would be preferable to use a direct
behavioural measurement if a relation with learning is important. The