LEARNING BY TEACHING: Action Research into Changes in Metalearning Capacity of Taiwanese Secondary School Students

Abstract

This is an action-based study, aiming to investigate the design, implementation, and evaluation of a pedagogical innovation intended to encourage the development of metalearning capacity in Taiwanese secondary school students. Even though the customary approaches to learning may boost performance in examinations, the students may have also established ignorance of themselves as learners and of the appropriateness of various learning strategies in different situations. In order to develop students into lifelong and self-directed learners, it is valuable to promote their awareness of their learning processes in different contexts and encourage them to take control over their learning strategy selection and deployment (Biggs, 1985).
The innovative program was a year long English as a foreign language (EFL) elective course in a Taiwanese secondary school, developed and field-tested through a two-cycle action research project. The participants were grade 10 students (12 in the first cycle and 15 in the second) who took full part in the program. The first-round study collected data mainly from the students’ reflective journals; the second-round study involved additional data sources, including a semi-structured interview and an open-ended questionnaire. Qualitative content analysis, using the coding schemes modeled after previous literature, was adopted to examine the data.
This study suggests the principles to facilitate the development of students’ metalearning capacity, namely engaging students in counter-normative role-taking experience, guiding them towards a deeper level of reflection, and building reciprocal interactions among students and between students and teachers. Resistance to this process of transformation might be related to the contextual culture in which the innovative program was situated, and could possibly be addressed by encouraging a change in teacher role and responsibility as well as in overall school climate.