Abstract:

Most of the pedagogical proposals discussed in recent years in higher education coincide in prioritizing the development of skills for self-learning, in such a way that students develop skills to adapt and propose solutions to problematic situations in different contexts. It is about training people who can successfully join the different work areas, as well as reasonably cope with everyday life situations. The development and application of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies have thus become important components in university education. The former contributes to increase and improve the products of cognitive activity, favor the coding and storage of information, its subsequent retrieval, and its use in solving problems. Metacognitive strategies are used to plan, monitor, and evaluate the application of cognitive strategies. Although the importance of metacognition is widely recognized, in practice the incorporation of specific strategies to promote it is not very frequent. However, the health emergency has caused a mandatory change towards remote learning modality and, with it, the need to redesign pedagogical strategies. The new context implies that the students assume greater autonomy in their learning process and that teachers design strategies that contribute to developing and strengthening the skills necessary for the students to successfully achieve their learning goals. The objective of this work was to compare the metacognitive skills profile of two groups of first-year science and engineering students from a Peruvian university. One of the groups corresponds to students who joined the university during the health emergency and have followed the remote learning modality. The second group corresponds to students evaluated in normal time in the face-to-face mode. The instrument used was the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) which allows identifying metacognitive skills in two categories: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. The results obtained showed significant differences between both groups, verifying that there was a better level of development of metacognitive skills in the group that followed the remote learning modality.

Keywords:

Metacognition, metacognitive awareness, distance learning, assessment.