How Do the Romanian Students Learn? Metacognition and Experiential Learning in the Romanian School Curricula

Fundamental for the development of the lifelong learning skills, the metacognitive processes are connected to the experiential model of learning. In an age where information is a click away, the development of higher-order thinking skills becomes essential for a relevant content for learning. The first step should be the development of the metacognitive processes and the critical thinking skills, not only as prerequisites for the school success, in an era where the documentation involves selections and hierarchies, but also as a foundation for social insertion. The school syllabuses should target the development of metacognitive strategies, in the spirit of student-centred teaching-learning activity. Our paper traces the way they deal with metacognition, observing the precariousness of the specific skills that could develop it, in order to assess the knowledge level of the learning strategies and their use in the disciplines from the “Language and communication” and “Man and society” curricular areas, as the students and even the teachers that are trained using these syllabuses are experiencing difficulties when these skills are necessary. In addition, after graduation, the obstacles in the development of metacognitive processes in students can be more difficult to overcome, the purpose of the present research being precisely to reveal them.