Organizing Metacognitive Tutoring Around Functional Roles of Teachers

Metacognitive skills are critical in learning but difficult to teach. Thus the question becomes how can we facilitate metacognitive tutoring? We present an exploratory learning environment called MILA-T with embedded metacognitive tutors imitating five functional roles of teachers in classrooms. We tested MILA–T in a controlled experiment with 237 middle school students. We examine the impact of MILA–T on the models of a natural phenomenon constructed by the students. We find that students with access to MILA–T wrote better evidential justifications for their models, and thus, deliver better-justified models for the phenomenon. We also find that these improvements persisted during a transfer task. These results lend support for organizing metacognitive tutoring around the functional roles of teachers for supporting inquiry-driven modeling.