Abstract:

This study aimed to investigate Rwandan secondary school students’ use of metacognitive abilities and their effectiveness in solving mathematics word problems. Metacognitive abilities are categorised into metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills. Metacognitive knowledge is divided into people, tasks, and strategies, while metacognitive skills comprise self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-control. This study randomly selected 96 Grade 11 students from a registration list of public schools in Kyonza district, East County. The word problem used in this study was a non-routine problem which is solved using equations. The problem-solving process was assessed from the six perspectives described above. The percentage of correct answers was 42%. No statistically significant differences were found between the metacognitive abilities of correct and incorrect respondents. In other words, students who failed to derive a correct answer utilised metacognitive skills as those who answered correctly. In particular, there is little difference in the mean scores between correct and incorrect responders in terms of self-monitoring and self-control while solving the problem and in self-assessment to explain the difficult parts. However, there is a statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of what they think about while reading the problem and their confidence in solving the problem and the reasons for it, revealing differences in metacognitive knowledge of people, tasks, and strategies. Thus, it can be said that the correct responders formulate a problem-solving strategy using their previous learning experience and content while reading the problem. Considering little difference was found in metacognitive skills during and after answering the questions, the results suggest that correct respondents used metacognitive skills correctly by recalling previous knowledge and its usage, while incorrect respondents used metacognitive skills but could not utilize their metacognitive skills effectively when solving the problem. This point needs further research. Currently, this is the only empirical study regarding this topic in Rwanda, and further studies on this topic must be conducted in future.

Keywords:

Metacognition, Mathematics, Metacognitive knowledge, Metacognitive skills, Rwanda.