Effects of Metacognitive Intervention in Low-Performing Vocational Students

The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a teacher-administered metacognitive training module on the performance and strategy-use of vocational students considered as "slow learners." Prior to the experiment all experimental teachers underwent an extended training. Moreover, they received all didactic materials of the training module as well as several mediation guides. The progress made by the trained students was controlled by a quasi-experimental design including a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. The training module, both composed of decontextualized and school-related tasks, was taught in a class setting. The experimental group 1 (EG1) applied the whole training module in a prescribed way. The efficacy of this training is compared to that of an experimental group 2 (EG2) whose teachers received the same training as the teachers of the EG1, but they were free to choose only specific parts of the module, instead of the training in its entirety, and to follow the mediation guides in a less rigorous fashion. Both experimental groups were compared to a control group that did not follow any specific training. The results show that the training module had significant effects on the students' performance in multiple domains and on the quality and quantity of strategies used. An analysis in terms of gain scores revealed an association between improvement in performance and improvement in strategy use, suggesting that the acquisition of strategies may be responsible for better performance.