For the past two years, the authors have combined training on metacognition with skills identified by practitioners to teach undergraduate civil engineering students how to evaluate the reasonableness of structural analysis results. Metacognition is a sequence of steps followed by a person to monitor and improve that person's own cognitive performance in an area. The practitioner skills taught fall into three categories: fundamental principles, approximations, and features of the solution. When combined, the training has resulted in a measurable increase in student ability to evaluate the reasonableness of results. This paper summarizes how the training was incorporated in the classroom and homework assignments. Results from surveys, observations from interviews, and exam scores are presented to show the effect of the training on attitude, behavior and cognition. The paper concludes with suggestions on how the training might be applied in other fields of engineering.
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Hanson et al. (2020) studied this question.