Conceptual Learning and Scientific Reasoning of the STEM Students as Influenced by Metacognitive Strategies

This mixed method research aimed to determine the influence of metacognitive strategies to the conceptual learning and scientific reasoning of the STEM students.This was conducted to the 312 out of 1411 grade 12 STEM students of public schools in the province of Capiz for the school year 2023-2024.Stratified sampling were employed in the sample.The data were gathered using a 37-item Conceptual Learning Test where questions were adopted from the General Chemistry 1 Modules provided by the Department of Education was utilized for conceptual learning and 24item adopted Scientific Reasoning Test from Lawson Scientific Reasoning Test was used for the scientific reasoning.An adopted 52 items Metacognitive Strategies Questionnaire from Schraw and Dennison (1994) was utilized to determine the metacognitive strategies employed by the students.In order to validate and verify detailed and relevant information, a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) was utilized for STEM students to gather data from Grade 11 STEM students of different schools for the Focus Group Discussion.The guide questions consist of 11 questions.The descriptive statistics used were the frequency count, mean, and standard deviation while One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Pearson r were used for inferential statistics.All inferential tests were set at 0.05 alpha level of significance.The findings showed that the level metacognitive strategies of the STEM students was high.In terms of subcomponents under the knowledge about cognition, subdomain procedural knowledge was "high" and the highest among the three, followed by the declarative knowledge which was "high" and the conditional knowledge as "high" also.On the other hand, the highly utilized in the regulation of cognition subdomains was debugging which was "high", information management strategies was "high", and evaluation was "high".However, the planning was "moderate" and the comprehension monitoring was the lowest as "moderate also.The overall level of conceptual learning of the STEM students was moderate.The subcomponent concrete was "high", identity and classification were "moderate", and formalization was "low".The overall level of scientific reasoning of the STEM students was low.In terms of its subcomponents, conservation was "low", proportional reasoning was "low", identification and control of variables was "low", probabilistic and combinatorial reasoning was "low", and hypothetical-deductive was "high".There was no significant difference in scientific reasoning among the levels of metacognitive strategies of STEM students.There was a significant difference in scientific reasoning among the levels of conceptual learning of STEM students.Lastly, there was no significant relationship between metacognitive strategies and conceptual learning and between metacognitive strategies and scientific reasoning.On the other hand, there was a significant relationship between conceptual learning and scientific reasoning of the STEM students.