Abstract
This thesis uses an emergent design employing a mixture of conventional and non-conventional methods to examine metacognition from within the context of North West Tasmanian senior secondary schools, between the years 2017 to 2021. Tasmania, and North West Tasmania in particular, is an area where student outcomes have been an issue of concern for numerous years due to their low performance relative to other states in Australia, and a considerable body of research supports the importance of metacognition for learning and academic success.The initial research methods employed three cycles of conventional research in a PAR paradigm, with students and teachers being surveyed and interviewed. This was followed by a professional learning cycle which offered a workshop for teachers around best pedagogical practices for metacognitive development, including self-video analyses with the use of an observation tool, and lastly an additional interview session with two participating teachers.
Conventional data analysis applied the theoretical frameworks of Shraw and Moshman’s Metacognitive Development Theory, Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Learning Theory, and Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory. This was then ‘diffracted’ using Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, whereby the notion of ‘data’ was reconceptualised to include the research process itself, in which the researcher, ways of knowing and what is known are entangled.
Conventional reading of the data identified that negative influences on metacognitive development among the participant cohort included mental health issues, student motivation and agency. This analysis also found that the data supported the value of teacher training in the area of metacognition and teaching for metacognitive development. The conventional was then re-viewed with/through a non-conventional, post-human, agential realist lens, which saw metacognition as an entangled phenomenon within which the intra-actions of relata may help or hinder metacognitive development. According to the diffractive analysis, mental health issues and motivation-agency, identified in the conventional analysis, can be seen to produce patterns which can be read as diffractions in metacognitive development.
This thesis contributes to the field of metacognitive research through both its conventional and post-conventional data analyses; with the conventional data analysis identifying the factors of mental health issues and motivation-agency as having an influence on students’ learning and metacognitive development in North West Tasmanian senior secondary schools. The agential realist reading of the data suggested that these factors vii (mental health and motivation/agency) may also be considered as relata-with/in-metacognitive phenomena and proposes that metacognition be considered as a co-creation of entangled phenomena in which student, teacher and all other material and non-material relata are ontologically inseparable. Metacognition is widely viewed as being influenced by a multitude of factors, and an agential realist framework emphasises the intra-relatedness, or ‘intra-action’, of all things, and the effects of these intra-actions on enacting particular materialisations. As applied to metacognition, it encourages educators to be attentive to their words and actions as boundary-making processes that make a difference in the differential mattering of the world (Barad, 2007). Through these causal intra-actions, teachers themselves contribute to bringing-into-being students’ metacognition and learning.
| Date of Award | 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | David R. Cole (Supervisor) |