The metacognitive regulation on ways of thinking in the biology classroom

Abstract

The teaching and learning of science is often problematic due to multiple factors. One of these problems corresponds to the ways of thinking or epistemological obstacles such as, among others, essentialism or determinism. In this paper, we set out to characterize the processes of metacognitive regulation that emerged during a teaching proposal based on modeling and metacognition on epistemological obstacles. This characterization was based on the data collected from the sequence for teaching two models of evolutionary biology. From a qualitative-interpretative perspective, three categories were constructed to fulfill the objective. One of them corresponds to a simple type of regulation in which only the epistemological obstacle is pointed out under certain explanations of the students. The other two categories correspond to a complex type of regulation in which, in addition to pointing out, an alternative explanation is constructed with elements constructed during the didactic sequence. In the latter, we distinguish individual and social type regulations. These categories allow us to think about possible interventions to develop the metacognitive skills necessary to build critical thinking in students.