Social Interaction and Ability Grouping: Their Effects on Students’ Metacognitive Experiences in Stoichiometric Problem Solving

This study investigates the effects of social interaction and ability grouping on students’ metacognitive experiences in stoichiometric problem solving. The social and educational dimensions of social interactions are particularly investigated in this paper. The educational dimension of social interaction includes ability grouping while the social dimension comprises metacognitive functions and transactive structures. Metacognitive functions include the generation of New Idea and the Assessments of strategy, results, and understanding. Transactive structures involve self-disclosure, feedback request, and other monitoring responses. Students’ metacognitive experiences include feelings of liking, difficulty, confidence, satisfaction, and estimates of time, effort, and solution correctness. This descriptive study employed both the quantitative and qualitative methods. The results showed that students’ metacognitive functions and transactive structures vary across ability groups. Moreover, metacognitive functions and transactive structures showed a weak degree of association with ability grouping. Students’ metacognitive experiences like feelings of liking, difficulty, confidence, satisfaction, and estimates of time, effort, and solution correctness vary across ability groups. Although metacognitive functions and transactive structures affect quantitatively students’ metacognitive experiences in solving stoichiometry problems, the effect does not vary across ability groups. However, it is important to note that other monitoring transactive structure influences students’ feeling of difficulty and estimate of effort in solving chemistry tasks across ability groups.