Fostering Metacognitive Learning in Practice-Oriented Industry Courses of Two-Year VET Programmes

SFIVET thereby continues its efforts in developing and researching supportive mea­sures for VET students with learning difficulties due to lower cognitive or academic performance. A preceding research project, “Individual Learning Support for Students in Two-Year VET Program­mes”, was completed in 2008. The goal of this new project is to develop a metacognitive training approach which blends with the content goals of industry courses so that occupation-specific and self-reflective and self-regulated learning of trai­nees in two-year VET programmes can be jointly fostered.

The project relates to theoretical concepts of metacognitive regulation of learning and to meta­cognitive training research. First, a design-based approach is taken to develop metacognitively enriched forms of training for the occupation-specific and practice-oriented setting of industry courses (for car mechanics in a two-year VET programme). Second, industry trainers will im­plement the new elements to foster the learning and problem solving strategies of the trainees while they practice occupation-specific skills on tasks and exercises that are typical for their industry courses. The training is designed on the basis of extended field-observations in industry courses and in close collaboration with a group of industry course trainers. Important occupational competencies (skills, knowledge, attitudes) to be built in their courses and typical learning difficulties of the trai­nees are analysed to infer suggestions for enriching the tasks, the instructional material (texts and visuals) and the teaching-learning interactions. Additionally, a questionnaire survey on the structuring and organisation of teaching-learning in industry courses and the handling of learning problems was conducted with all the trainers of car mechanics in two-year VET programmes. The training goals are to enable trainers to mediate self-regulated learning and encourage the trainees to make more use of metacognitive knowledge and strategies. Respective expected training effects will be evaluated in the project.

Further, the trainees’ learning motivation and the transfer of strategies from/to the workplace and the vocational school will be assessed. A manual which describes the metacognitively enriched forms of training in industry courses for car mechanics will be published. It can serve as a blueprint to broaden the approach to industry training courses of other VET programmes in SFIVET courses for VET professionals.