The Relationship Between Modality and Metacognition While Interacting with AutoTutor

In this paper we explored the relationship between metacognitive statements and learning gains with students’ typed and spoken interactions with an intelligent tutoring system, called AutoTutor. Analyses revealed that students who entered their contributions via speech showed a significantly higher proportion of metacognitive statements (e.g., I’m not following, I understand). There was a significant negative correlation between metacognitive statements and posttest scores on both typed and spoken interactions. Students with low prior knowledge expressed more metacognitive statements than did students with high prior knowledge. Therefore, metacognitive expressions reflect the learners’ knowledge deficits as opposed to improved knowledge monitoring from greater subject matter knowledge.