Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of Computer Based Instruction (CBI) on students science achievement and metacognition. The CBI uses educational software integrated with metacognitive prompts which are appropriate for the instructional strategies based on constructivist theory for the concepts in the unit of “Electricity on Our Lives”. The study used “pre test-post test control group” semi-experimental model. While the experiment group used CBI integrated with metacognitive prompts, the control group used instruction recommended in the class by the curriculum of the Ministry of National Education and the instruction used by the teacher. A total of 53 students were included in the study. Of these, 25 were included in experimental group, 28 were included in the control group. The same teachers instructed in both experiment and control groups. Data collection tools used in the study: Electricity in our lives achievement test which included 35 questions and Kuder-Richardson–20 coefficient which was found as 0.81. Open-ended questions contained five items to investigate how the students construct the concepts and to determine their understanding level of the concepts. Metacognition Scale (MS) has two main components of knowledge of cognition and knowledge of regulation and many dimensions under these two components. The factors covered by the component knowledge of cognition are declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and conditional knowledge. Knowledge of regulation component, on the other hand, includes planning, self-control, cognitive strategies, self-evaluation and self-monitoring factors. The internal consistency of Metacognition Scale is 0.96 and it has 30 items. The metacognitive skills in the educational software were planning, self-monitoring, self-assessment and self-checking. At the stage of planning, the students were asked to review the knowledge they learned in previous grades and to identify their goals before starting the activity. At the stage of self-monitoring, the students who continued the activities in the software were asked questions to review what they had done or learnt until that time. The stage of self-assessment contained questions that enabled the students to evaluate their strong and weak aspects during the activities. Furthermore, prior to the activity, there was a question which indicated the types of changes in the views of the students who had an alternative or wrong view about the concepts in the activity. At the stage of self-checking, the students make a comparison between their initial assumption and the observation results. After this, the students determine, if any, their mistakes and write these mistakes in the study page. The software offers a journal to increase the metacognitive awareness of the students. According to the pre-test results, there was not a significant difference between the achievement scores of experimental and control group students. However a significant difference was found between the scores of post test. There was no significant difference between the experiment and control group in MS scores of pre test. However, there was a significant difference in favor of the experiment group in all the factors in the post test. The analysis of the open-ended questions continues.

Keywords:

electricity, metacognition, education software.