Hello everyone, nice to meet you.

I am Hirata, a first-year master’s student. I am developing and evaluating a system to help learners acquire “learning strategies” for English vocabulary, where they focus on the “sound” of words and memorize them by listening to and pronouncing them. Simply put, learning strategies are “learning methods” deeply tied to a learner’s views and beliefs about learning. The relationship between learning strategies and academic performance has been pointed out in many previous studies, and it has been reported that using specific learning strategies improves students’ academic performance. To encourage the use of learning strategies, it is necessary to improve the learner’s “metacognition.” Based on this, my system is designed to encourage the use of learning strategies by improving the learner’s “metacognition.”

At Yamada Laboratory, we hold an English seminar every week. The purpose of this is for the person in charge to read previous research related to their own study and discuss the structure, impact, and limitations of that research. This time, I read the following paper.

Paper Title: “Enhancing metacognitive awareness of undergraduates through using an e-educational video environment”
Authors: Serhat Altıoka, Zeynep Başerb, Erman Yükseltürka
Year of Publication: 2019
Journal Name: Computers & Education

I chose this paper because, in developing my own system, I wanted to understand the design elements necessary for improving metacognition, as well as the indicators and statistical processing for evaluating metacognition.

To summarize the content, this is a study that verified the impact of portfolios on students’ metacognitive levels. Portfolios are widely used in educational settings because they encourage the monitoring, evaluation, and reflection of learning activities, and enable feedback from peers and teachers. In this paper, an experiment was conducted with 85 university students, dividing them into a group that used a portfolio and a group that did not, and the metacognitive scores between the two groups were compared before and after the experiment. The results of the experiment showed a significant improvement in metacognition in the group that used the video portfolio. Therefore, it was clarified that portfolios improve students’ metacognition and efficiently support the learning process.

This paper was very helpful for understanding previous research on metacognition, elements that improve metacognition, and indicators and statistical processing for evaluating metacognition. In particular, I gained the insight that the feature on the portfolio that allows viewing other students’ records leads to reflecting on one’s own learning behavior. However, I had some doubts regarding the experimental design. For example, in the experimental group, in addition to the portfolio, learning using games was also practiced, and I felt that the improvement in metacognition in the experimental group might also be related to that effect. Also, there was no mention of the design of the portfolio to promote metacognition, and it was a pity that I could not know which elements of the portfolio contribute to the improvement of metacognition. While it is interesting as a practice, as a study, it is important to separate the perspectives you want to see, so that point remained a bit of a question.

However, by reading a paper from Computers & Education, one of the top journals in Educational Technology, I was able to learn various things such as how to write a paper and how to develop logical arguments.