| Summary: | The study examines two components of metacognitive knowledge in the context of inquiry learning: metatask and metastrategic. Existing work on the topic has shown that adolescents often lacked metacognitive understanding necessary for optimal inquiry learning (Keselman & Kuhn, 2002; Kuhn, 2002a; Kuhn, Black, Keselman, & Kaplan, 2000), but demonstrated that engagement with inquiry tasks may improve it (Keselman, 2003; Kuhn & Pearsall, 1998).<br />The aim of the study is to investigate the gains in metacognitive knowledge that occur as a result of repeated engagement with an inquiry learning task, and to examine the relationship between metacognitive knowledge and performance on the task.<br />The participants were 34 eighth grade pupils, who participated in a self-directed experimentation task using the FILE programme (Hulshof, Wilhelm, Beishuizen, & van Rijn, 2005). The task required pupils to design and conduct experiments and to make inferences regarding the causal structure of a multivariable system. Pupils participated in four learning sessions over the course of one month. Metacognitive knowledge was assessed by the questionnaire before and after working in FILE.<br />The results indicate that pupils improved in metacognitive knowledge following engagement with the task. However, many pupils showed insufficient metacognitive knowledge in the post-test and failed to apply newly achieved knowledge to the transfer task. Pupils who attained a higher level of metacognitive knowledge were more successful on the task than pupils who did not improve on metacognitive knowledge. A particular level of metacognitive understanding is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for successful performance on the task.
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