Connecting student self-regulation, metacognition and learning to analogical thinking in a physics problem-solving discourse

This paper reports on a study that employed a case study approach to investigate students’ science learning processes in a problem-solving discourse by focusing on the question: how are student selfefficacy, metacognition, learning and analogical communication related? The study engaged high school physics students in solving novel physics problems on a field trip to an amusement park. It demonstrated that those with high potential to engage the monitoring-planning-evaluation aspect of metacognition had the ability to infer meaning of the unknown from understanding of the similar in what is already known or easily understandable, and often understood and expressed their thoughts analogically. In other words, this category of students engaged the constructive connectivity aspect of learning. Thus, during the process of developing solutions to challenging novel problems, it was apparent that the students who were able to argue and express their ideas in analogical terms were also highly metacgnitive and succeeded in developing viable models for solutions to the novel problems