Mixing Backward- with Forward-Chaining for Metacognitive Skill Acquisition and Transfer
This addresses improving learning outcomes for students deficient in metacognitive skills, though it is incremental as it builds on known methods for skill acquisition.
The study tackled teaching metacognitive skills to students lacking strategy- and time-awareness by mixing backward-chaining with forward-chaining in a logic tutor, resulting in experimental students outperforming controls and matching skilled peers in both logic and probability domains.
Metacognitive skills have been commonly associated with preparation for future learning in deductive domains. Many researchers have regarded strategy- and time-awareness as two metacognitive skills that address how and when to use a problem-solving strategy, respectively. It was shown that students who are both strategy-and time-aware (StrTime) outperformed their nonStrTime peers across deductive domains. In this work, students were trained on a logic tutor that supports a default forward-chaining (FC) and a backward-chaining (BC) strategy. We investigated the impact of mixing BC with FC on teaching strategy- and time-awareness for nonStrTime students. During the logic instruction, the experimental students (Exp) were provided with two BC worked examples and some problems in BC to practice how and when to use BC. Meanwhile, their control (Ctrl) and StrTime peers received no such intervention. Six weeks later, all students went through a probability tutor that only supports BC to evaluate whether the acquired metacognitive skills are transferred from logic. Our results show that on both tutors, Exp outperformed Ctrl and caught up with StrTime.