Students' Ideas about Their Conceptualization: Their Elicitation through Instruction.

Project META (Metacognitive Enhancing Teaching Activities) is a 3-year naturalistic case study designed to explicitly enhance the metacognitive capabilities of learners in order to illuminate the nature of metacognitive interactions among elementary students and to describe the impact this type of enhancement has on the formation of students' conceptual knowledge. This study discusses the preliminary findings of the first year's data in which the classroom interaction and development of physical science concepts of six cohorts of students, grades 1-6, were studied. The study examines how metacognition can be promoted in individual science students, the role of classroom discourse in facilitating the development of metacognition, the nature of metacognitive processes, and the role of metacognition in promoting conceptual knowledge development in the elementary science classroom. Selected samples of discourse from six different grade levels illuminated the nature of metacognitive interactions among elementary students. Data analysis indicates that: (1) students can provide extensive and varied evidence of their metacognitive capabilities; (2) students become more capable of being metacognitive over time as evidenced by comparisons of metacognitive discourse taken from second, third, and fourth graders; (3) a qualitative difference in the types of metacognitive statements is produced by the students; and (4) conceptual changes took place in the learners as indicated by the students' statements. Contains 33 references. (MDH)