Abstract:

In the one-year preparatory course for engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the students take courses in science (physics, mathematics), languages (Norwegian, English) and social science. With a heavy curriculum and students with no prior experience with university studies, it requires extensive practice in all the learning objectives, and the students thus have one or two tests or hand-in exercises in various subjects every week of the scholastic year. The classes are large, and the teachers do not have time to give feedback to all students on every test. Consequently, we have developed alternative methods of dealing with evaluation and feedback, as well as, and more importantly, attempting to make the students reflect on their metacognitive strategies in order to better enhance further learning.

This article will present some of our methods for reflection of performances and metacognitive strategies in subjects stretching from mathematics to language and social science. The tasks of reflection given to the students span from reflections on single exercises, through sets of exercises covering learning objectives from the last couple of weeks, to reflections of months or of the whole scholastic year, from beginning to end. They attempt to challenge students not only in what they have learned and what they struggle to understand, but also in how they learned what they have learned, or why they did not manage to learn it, and subsequently how they should precede working with these learning objectives or the following ones. A course in studying techniques at the beginning of the year and regular conversations about learning methods constitute an attempt of a background they can use to reflect when challenged with questions like these.

Keywords:

Education, learning strategies, metacognition, reflection, assessment, self-assessment.