The field of this research is in a cross-section between the professional training of the mentaly retarded peoples and the development of executive functioning that would increase the quality of their learning. There are two main reasons to prospect in th

METACOGNITIVE TRAINING: EVALUATION OF MEDIATION AND TRANSFER EFFECTS WITH MENTALLY RETARDED APPRENTICES.

Didier Strasser and Fredi P. Büchel

Université de Genève
Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Éducation
9, rte de Drize
CH-1227 Carouge

Summary

Socio-professional teachers were trained to use a cognitive education program (DELF) to increase the metacognitive functioning of apprentices with mental retardation. After eight sessions of in-service training, the apprentices were interviewed about their professional experiences in order to evaluate the effects of teacher mediation. Mediational effects from teachers to students were expected to result from the introduction of the cognitive education program. Given the nature of the program, these effects should be identified by metacognitive components in the interview protocols. Even if the results didn't show a notable transfer effect, they allow the authors to describe the general cognitive profile of the students. They also reinforce the necessity of a specific cognitive training program for apprentices with mental retardation.

Abstract

Earlier research with adolescent and adult vocational students revealed a lack of metacognitive awareness, impaired learning processes, and absence or lack of generalization (Büchel, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1988). These results led Büchel & Büchel (1995) to design a metacognitive program (DELF) for vocational training.

We hypothesized that previous observations with regular apprentices could be transposed to apprentices with mental retardation. In order to validate this hypothesis preliminary evaluations were conducted with mentally retarded populations (Horisberger-Golaz, 1994; Schneiter-Malpangotti, 1995; Nicolier, 1996; Strasser, 1995). In this paper we present an evaluation of an in-service training for teachers given in a center for socio-professional training of female adolescents with mental retardation. The main purpose of the training was to create an awareness in the socio-professional staff regarding the benefits of a metacognitive way of teaching. We hypothesized that the trained professional teachers would modify their teaching style to adopt a more metacognitive orientation, which would indirectly influence the metacognitive awareness of the students. The goal of the evaluation was to verify our hypothesis. We therefore interviewed 15 female students from 15-22 years to verify if significant effects of a metacognitive teaching style can be detected in their discourse about their professional experiences.

The DELF program attempts to foster the two main components of metacognition. On the one hand, the program is designed to increase the students' metacognitive knowledge, i.e. knowledge of one's own cognitive functioning, of task-related factors and of problem solving strategies (Flavell & Wellman, 1977). For example, in DELF exercises the students are asked to carefully and systematically describe the tasks before attempting to solve them. On the other hand, the students are encouraged to control their own cognitive processes by planning, monitoring and evalutating them. This focus on executive functioning takes the second major component into account that has been described in metacognitive theory (Brown, 1978; Cavanaugh & Perlmutter, 1982). Büchel & Borkowski (1983) and Büchel (1990b) proposed a general model of the instructional application of metacognitive theory. The DELF program represents a possible realization of this model.

With respect to evaluating training programs, many authors have suggested to look carefully at different levels of generalization and transfer (Belmont, Butterfield, & Ferretti, 1980; Campione & Brown, 1984; Büchel, 1990a). It is important to look for transfer effects of cognitive training programs outside the domain of school subject learning, for example, in contexts of vocational training.

After two days of informal observations of the teachers and apprentices at their work place, the socio-professional staff was trained for 6 days (1 day a month). The training included exercises from the DELF program as well as a selection of video taped working samples. One month after the last training session we interviewed the apprentices at their work place. We expected to identify metacognitive components in the students' answers with respect to the five following domains: task representation, comparison between different tasks, task planning, anticipation and preparation of required material, reflecting about one's own professional experience. A discourse analysis was conducted to identify instances of metacognitive knowledge and processes, and to derive an estimate of the degree of metacognitive awareness expressed in the interviews. The data were transcribed and transformed into a propositional system based on Kintsch (1972), Meyer (1975) and Sowarka, Abel & Michel (1983). Each proposition was attributed to a category within a set of possible answer categories. These categories were ordered according to their level of explicitness of the metacognitive statements. We expected to find more propositions for the most explicite categories than for the rest of them.

The results do not completely support our hypothesis. Only one of the metacognitive components (anticipation and preparation of required material) was expressed with significant presence in the interviews. Considering that anticipation was the first metacognitive activity introduced in the staff training, and that the teachers were asked to immediately apply and teach this strategy, the other training components probably weren't as firmly established yet in the students' representations at the time of interviewing. It is possible that our evaluation was introduced too early to detect notable effects. Further, methodological biases due to the discourse analysis of the interviews cannot be excluded.

Although our expectations weren't fully confirmed, this study enabled us to collect new data regarding to the metacognitive skills of students with mild mental retardation. It seems that the students in this study had a fairly good task representation, as well as some knowledge of appropriate strategies how to solve them. However we have noticed that they lack executive control functions. Only few of the students systematically plan for different subgoals that they pursue and monitor when they solve their tasks. They don't compare a new task with an old one in order to apply the same strategies. Instead they often ask their teachers how to solve a task. They don't monitor the course and the result of their actions, nor do they initially try to control of their understanding of a task, which would be crucial for selecting good strategies. These findings underline the need of a specific cognitive training program which can be embedded into socio-professional training activities for students with mild mental retardation. We think that the DELF program can be used for this purpose, and it would be interesting to evaluate its effects in a more controlled and extended implementation.

References:

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