The Disciplinary Learning Companion: The Impact of Disciplinary and Topic-Specific Reflection on Students' Metacognitive Abilities and Academic Achievement

One of the main goals of science and engineering education is to guide students in becoming proficient problem solvers. Metacognitive abilities play an important role here, since they help students to regulate their own solving process. The Disciplinary Learning Companion (DLC) is an online tool that aims at developing these abilities through discipline- and topic-specific reflection on the solving process. In this contribution, we report on the results of the implementation of the DLC in a first-year Newtonian mechanics course. We studied the interplay between students' interaction with the DLC (online learning traces), their metacognitive abilities (pre and post self-reported questionnaire), academic achievement (final exam score and particular exam problem score), and conceptual understanding (coding exam problem). We found no significant relationship between students' interaction with the DLC and their metacognitive abilities as measured by the self-reported questionnaire. The results, however, show that students that used the tool more frequently obtain a higher final exam score and have a better conceptual understanding of the exam problem considered. Moreover, the results suggest that the topic-specificity of the reflection questions plays a role in the improvement in academic achievement.