EXPLORING ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF TEACHING METACOGNITIVE AND EPISTEMIC SKILLS

The social existence of human kind poses numerous and complicated problems both to theorists and practitioners. Due to their complex nature, organizations are scenes where complexity and uncertainty thrive without the chance of being controlled. Moreover and quite often, during education and training, decision-makers received no information regarding possible solutions to the practical problems they cope with. It seems that schools, no matter how prestigious, cannot teach everything one needs to know during one's career. In situations like the above mentioned, an independent learning process based on metacognition and epistemic knowledge is undertaken by any decision-maker, and in fact, by any person. However, schools and universities are teaching little if anything on Metacognition or Epistemology. In this paper we are presenting some of the results achieved during experimental research using a serious game demo. We have presented three randomly assigned groups of students the same material. The first group watched a video lecture and got to play a 3D game, the second group received a printed material and the third group participated in a lecture. All three teaching methods presented identical content and at the end subjects were asked to respond to questions based on the theory they had just received. Preliminary data show some encouraging results for the first method in what concerns motivation for learning, but also on the ability of memorizing and solving problems. Concerning the attitude towards self-teaching motivation was found to be quite low, a fact which could be consistent with the low results achieved in learning.