The Effect of Metacognitive Prompts on Students Decision Making Abilities in a Socio-Scientific Issue Context
Abstract: The present study aims to develop senior high school students’ decision-making (DM) abilities regarding Socio-Scientific Issues (SSIs) through incorporating the DM framework which includes three stages: recognizing the decision problem, differentiation, and post-decision consolidation (Svenson, 1996) into the DM instruction. Two classes of eleventh graders were selected and randomly assigned into the control group (N=43) and the experimental group (N=43) for quasi-experimental methodology. Compared with the control group, the experimental group was added metacognitive prompts into worksheets. Furthermore, this study examines how these various DM abilities interact. An open-ended test was developed to assess students’ DM abilities. The results of the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test showed that there were significant differences between these two groups in the overall DM ability (U=626.00, Z=-2.65, r=0.29), generating criteria (U=758.00, Z=-1.65, r=0.18), using DM strategy (U=709.50, Z=-3.10, r=0.33), and evaluating DM results (U=626.00, Z=-2.65, r=0.29).