Effects of metacognitive help on knowledge acquisition in web-based learning environments

By means of an experiment with N = 40 university students the effectiveness of metacognitive help on knowledge acquisition in a closed web-based learning environment was investigated. The designed metacognitive help initiates and supports orientation, planning, and goal specification activities at the beginning of the learning phase, monitoring and regulation activities during learning and evaluation activities at the end of learning. 20 participants of the experimental group were prompted three times in the learning session to consider this metacognitive help, of which the specific meaning and application were trained in advance. 20 participants of the control group learned without metacognitive help and without training. The learning topic much less thanbasic concepts of Motivational Psychologymuch greater than had to be learned within 35 minutes. Learning behaviour was measured by the method of thinking aloud and the whole learning session was videotaped. Afterwards learning performance was obtained. As expected, the metacognitive help affected a better metacognitive behaviour and a better performance in far transfer tasks.