A strategy to support engineering education teaching staff monitoring students' learning process: metacognitive challenges

It is increasingly required that Engineering Education courses include activities that promote the development of cognitive skills, such as metacognition. However, including such activities is challenging for lecturers, particularly in Distance Learning contexts. It is also complex, when working online, for teaching staff to carry out monitoring of the metacognitive learning processes of students, understand their difficulties, and provide formative feedback. In this work, we present the design and discussion of a pedagogical strategy: Metacognitive Challenges (MC), which allows lecturers to monitor the evolution of students' perceptions regarding their learning process We discuss how lecturers can use MCs for formative assessment and how to weave this intervention with individual students or groups. The Design Science Research methodology was adopted for the design, implementation, and demonstration of MCs, applied in a Software Engineering course within a distance learning Informatics Engineering undergraduate programme. We exemplify how MCs have the potential to support monitoring of students' cognitive and metacognitive processes and offer a set of guidelines on how the teaching staff can use them. In future work, we intend to evaluate the effectiveness of MCs in different teaching contexts, and develop technological solutions that facilitate the monitoring process (reduce the time and effort required for analysis of MC content).This work was financially supported by National Funds through FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., and CIDTFF (UIDB/00194/2020) - Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, via Stimulus of Scientific Employment CEECIND/00986/2017 Individual Support 2017, and via project PTDC/CED-EDG/30040/2017. We would also like to thank all students and teachers who collaborated on this research.