Self monitoring skills through meta cognition based instruction an action research study

Abstract

The study attempts to explore the use of metacognitive writing strategies of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating in augmenting the critical writing skills of adult academic writers. The research study has particularly investigated four areas: (i) how adult academic writers use metacognitive strategies to plan, monitor and evaluate their writing, (ii) whether metacognition-based instruction have a considerable influence on the self-monitoring skills of adult academic writers, (iii) whether metacognitive training impacts the text organization skills of adult academic writers, and (iv) whether there exists a significant relationship between metacognition-based instruction and writers improvement in the organizational and contextual attributes of writing. The research design chosen for this study has been action research. To contend with the practical concerns concerning writing skills and to reach a concrete outcome, the data for the study has been accumulated and analyzed through different stages of action research, namely, Planning, Acting, Observing, and Reflecting. From an introduction to writing and metacognitive writing strategies in the first chapter, the research moves to address the theoretical underpinnings that guide and support the study in the second chapter. It discusses at length the different writing models proposed by cognitive psychologists, namely Hayes and Flower s 1980 Cognitive Model of Writing, Beretier and Scardamalia s 1987 Writing Model, and lastly Hayes 1996 Writing Model. The third chapter sheds light on the research methodology adopted forth study; the fourth chapter deals with the interpretation of the data obtained during two different phases, i.e., data obtained from the background study and the data obtained from the intervention phase. The fifth chapter provides an analysis and discussion of the results obtained from three sources: critical written compositions of students, journal entries and self-report questionnaire on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating.