Towards Teaching Metacognition: Supporting Spontaneous Self-Assessment

The Self-Assessment Tutor (SAT) is an add-on component to Cognitive Tutors that supports self-assessment in four steps: prediction, attempt, reflection, and projection. The SAT encourages students to self-assess their ability spontaneously while problem solving, and to use help resources accordingly. For that reason its episodes precede the students' work with the Cognitive Tutor, which itself remains unchanged. The SAT offers detailed feedback and help function to support the Self-Assessment process. A complementary instruction is given to students before working with the SAT. We hypothesize that working with the SAT will encourage students to self-assess on subsequent problems requiring similar skills, and thus will promote learning. A classroom evaluation of SAT is currently in progress.