Abstract:

Over the last 20 years, several scholars have designed and implemented experimental projects focused on the use of interactive learning environments (ILE) as tools to support an innovative teaching methodology to facilitate learning.

This paper aims to highlight how ILEs can contribute to the construction and consolidation of metacognitive skills and strategies of students at schools of all levels and at universities. More specifically, it is underlined how ILEs stimulate the four main skills of metacognition: prediction; planning; monitoring and evaluation.

Through the design of some experimental projects carried out in schools and universities, it is shown how ILEs offer students the possibility of understanding:
a) the aspects of a phenomenon that do not appear immediately or easily evident (for example, the existence of a gap between a current state and a desired state);
b) understand how a decision taken by a decision maker can also have a positive effect, but not always immediately resolving, on the problem (partial effectiveness of an action carried out to satisfy a need) or that a decision, although in some cases generating a positive effect in the short term, it produces a negative effect in the long term (counterintuitive and counterproductive effect);
c) that at the basis of an observed phenomenon there is always a precise structure characterized by reinforcing and balancing feedback;
d) that the behavior of an actor is influenced by variables external [exogenous] to the phenomenon (role of the context); that it is possible to predict - with margins of uncertainty to be estimated - the changes in the state of an observed phenomenon in light of alternative contexts [scenarios] (evaluation of the system's behavior based on its structure and the events that occur in the reference context).

In conclusion, it is noted that ILEs are extremely useful teaching methodologies to help understand the real complexity that characterizes a specific phenomenon being observed and analysed, allowing students to intuit [anticipate and/or predict] its evolution over the time, based on the decisions [actions] taken by the actors who operate in it and the results that these decisions produce in light of the different contexts within which the phenomenon occurs [alternative scenarios].

Keywords:

Interactive Learning Environment, Metacognition, Education, System Dynamics, Training.