Prompting undergraduate students’ metacognition of learning: implementing ‘meta-learning’ assessment tasks in the biomedical sciences

To succeed at post-secondary education, it’s essential that students develop an understanding of their own knowledge and learning processes. This metacognition of learning, or ‘meta-learning’, helps students to become more effective learners, as they become more aware of their self-regulatory processes and recognise the effectiveness of their study strategies. To increase biomedical science students’ self-awareness, we have designed and implemented meta-learning assessment tasks across our biomedical science courses. Most students reported that meta-learning tasks had a positive impact on their learning, as they prompted self-regulatory processes of forethought and self-reflection. We found that students were equally likely to change or not change their study strategies across subsequent semesters. Those students that did not change were generally high achievers, believing their study approaches were most effective, but their performance did not improve across semesters. In contrast, students who adapted, mostly by modifying how they appraised and rearranged records or improved planning and time management, performed less well overall but significantly improved their performance across semesters. Meta-learning tasks may prompt students to become more self-reflective and independent learners by affecting their approach to learning, enabling them to reflect on their study strategies, adapt and improve performance, and may enable the development of lifelong learning skills.