Introducing Non-Calculus Ready First Year Engineering Students to Metacognition Skills to Improve Academic Performance

Abstract

Background

College readiness is declining, increasing the number of students entering college with low math proficiency. These students are historically unable to make progress towards learning engineering skills until they’ve completed remedial math coursework and have low retention and graduation rates.

Purpose

This work describes a pilot study for a trigonometry based first-year engineering course designed to improve students’ performance in trigonometry while targeting the improvement of metacognition skills with the goal of increasing student success and retention.

Design/Method

Twenty-one (21) students were enrolled in the course, which implements a lecture series on metacognition skills and lectures designed to apply trigonometry to real-world engineering problems. One-semester and cumulative GPA and trigonometry and chemistry course grades were compared between the intervention and control groups. The intervention group took the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) before and after the intervention along with three exams with embedded metacognitive monitoring questions throughout the course. All statistical analysis was completed in R using appropriate Bayesian statistical methods.

Results

Students in the intervention received an A in their trigonometry courses at a higher rate than the control group. No significant change was seen in one-semester or cumulative GPA or chemistry performance. Improvements in metacognition skills were dependent on content difficulty and student preparation for the exams given.

Conclusion

The importance of developing coursework for non-calculus ready students will continue to increase. While not all results are statistically significant, additional work is warranted with a higher sample size to further examine the non-significant benefits seen in this study.