The role of metacognitive skills in learning to solve problems

Study I: Pilot 59
the spontaneous or automatic transfer of these highly practiced skills in
a somewhat new context. With ‘varied practice’ Salomon and Perkins
refer to the fact that “A cognitive element is learned and practiced in
a variety of contexts until it becomes quite automatic and somewhat
flexible because of the variety” (Salomon & Perkins, 1989, p. 120). This
invokes automatization; there is no need for elaborate reflection when
being confronted with a comparable situation that prompts the welllearned
behaviour to occur.
High-road transfer concerns the intentional and mindful abstraction
from knowledge in one context and the application of this knowledge in
another situation. Abstraction involves the extraction of generic characteristics
or general rules and principles from the learned material. Contextual
details that were perhaps prominently present in the learning
material are no longer important. “Abstraction thus involves decontextualisation
and representation of the decontextualized information in a
new, more general form subsuming other cases” (Salomon & Perkins,
1989, p. 125). With using the term ‘mindful’ Salomon and Perkins
refer to the fact that having mere abstractions is not sufficient. Learners
should also understand and be able to use such abstractions. Such
understanding is the result of active learning, where the learner has control
over the learning process. High-road transfer is guided by the use
of metacognitive skills (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara & Campione, 1983;
Salomon & Perkins, 1989). Metacognitive skills such as reflecting on the
nature of a problem, comprehension monitoring, planning, or reflecting
on the problem solving process are at the core of transfer of learning
(Mayer, 2002). Georghiades (2000) argues that a learner who reflects on
his or her learning process (that is, a metacognitive learner) reaches a
deeper understanding of the course material. This concerns meaningful
learning which is the basis for transfer. Reaching better understanding
means that the learner “...will be able to identify the use and purpose
of this knowledge, to handle learned material in a different manner and
to explore potential use of this material under a number of different circumstances”
(Georghiades, 2000, p. 128).
In conclusion, the first hypothesis for this study proposes that constructivist
learning environments support meaningful learning. Meaningful
learning is a condition for transfer. In this study, transfer of knowledge
is measured. In order to establish whether any transfer of knowledge
occurs, low-road transfer is measured as it is more difficult to measure
high-road transfer. The context used in this study to allow the measurement
of transfer consists of a case that is similar to Coltec (see chapter
3).