Assessing Metacognitive Skills in Computerized Learning Environments

In this chapter, metacognitive skills are considered to be an organized set of metacognitive self-instructions for the monitoring of and control over cognitive activity. These self-instructions can be represented as a production system of condition-action rules. For the assessment of metacognitive skills, however, these covert rules have to be inferred from overt learner behavior during task performance. In computerized learning tasks, on-line traces of learner activities can be unobtrusively stored in logfiles. Prerequisite to logfile assessment is the selection of relevant indicators of metacognitive learning activities on the basis of a rational task analysis, which indicators have to be validated against other on-line measures obtained with, for instance, thinking-aloud protocols. Such analyses of logfiles will allow for the assessment of metacognitive skills as an aptitude, that is, as a relatively stable repertoire of self-instructions. In order to further capture the dynamic change in metacognitive processes over time, progressive patterns of metacognitive activity can be identified in logged traces through time-series analysis. It is argued that the aptitude and dynamic approaches to assessing metacognitive skills are complementary to one another, rather than excluding each other.