Reflective assignments are a powerful tool in undergraduate STEM courses to promote student metacognition and give instructors and researchers a view of that process. We were interested in understanding student challenges in our developmental biology course, so we used reflective assignments to uncover these challenges and also add to our…

Introductory psychology students need supports to read and think in a discipline-specific way when learning psychology theories. We tested the effectiveness of using a task-model steps chart to help students understand, evaluate, and use theories presented in their introductory psychology textbook and lecture videos. We randomly assigned 52…

In a series of three video-recorded assignments over a 6-week period, undergraduate music education students (N = 16) enrolled in an instrumental methods course described aloud what they were thinking about as they practiced a three-note melody on a secondary brass instrument. Later, I completed a content analysis of the students' practice…

Metacognition is a key to effective learning, foundational to critical thinking and fostering scholarly and professional identity. Yet many faculty are uncertain how to integrate metacognitive skill development into classes. This article describes two metacognitive instruments, the TTM-LS and the LSSA, that are short, simple to use, and discipline…

Background: Analysing classroom dialogue is a widely used approach for understanding students' learning, often requiring team-based collaborative research. This presents a challenge for single researchers due to the labour-intensive nature of the process. Emerging advancements in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, enhance qualitative…