Abstract
Educational robotics (ER) has emerged as a novel educational tool that enables students to improve their thinking skills. The study aims to compare the effect of a structured versus an unstructured ER curriculum on students’ group metacognition during collaborative problem-solving with ER. The authors’ hypothesis is that an unstructured ER curriculum might be more beneficial in supporting young learners’ group metacognition in programming contexts. This study follows a quasi-experimental design with students (n = 35) split into two comparison groups – a structured ER curriculum group and an unstructured one. The results show that students in the structured curriculum group demonstrated higher levels of group metacognition and better collaboration. Furthermore, using a micro-ecological approach, the study reveals that individual metacognitive contributions from students in the unstructured curriculum group had a systemic impact on the group work progress.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 739578 and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy.
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Socratous, C., Ioannou, A. Evaluating the Impact of the Curriculum Structure on Group Metacognition During Collaborative Problem-solving Using Educational Robotics. TechTrends 66, 771–783 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00738-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00738-5