Page 12 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2020

significant developmental process. Hence, metacognitive skills do actively develop during late
adolescent but started to stationary coming into adulthood.
These challenges often non-existence when they were studying in high school as
pointed out by McGuire (2006) because without it, they can still achieve high academic
performance. In addition, in high school education teachers are always giving guidance when
it comes to completing task and homework. In this case, there is no need to students to do the
evaluation themselves. Despite all of these challenges, research conducted by Stanton, Neider,
Gallegos, & Clark (2015) showed that student studying biology at college level are willing to
adopt new learning strategy in future study plans. However, not all of them are able to appraise
the effectiveness of the specific learning strategy. In addition, less than half of the studied group
had the ability to use self-evaluation in making modification to their future study plan.
As previously stated, metacognitive skills develop overtime as one goes through life
phases. College student (including matriculation’s) are at the stage of actively developing
metacognitive skills. Carr & Taasoobshirazi (2008) share similar beliefs stating college
students have the most opportunity to develop metacognitive skills as they were constantly
being presented with educational challenges which requires them to use such skills.
Furthermore, college education includes a greater amount of knowledge and science process
skills that students are required to get their grip on. Woolfolk (2016) stated that when students
were presented with challenging task, student may have not realized that they are implementing
metacognitive skills. A well-trained thinking ability allows a student to find the right solution
when trying to solve a problem.
The literatures provide information that explores the concept of metacognitive strategy
in general academic setting. Many previous studies mainly focus on metacognitive strategy
among undergraduate students and little information available relating to biology education at
matriculation. Since, matriculation biology education has a different teaching and learning
approach, so previous findings may or may not reflect metacognition skills of matriculation
students. Hence, it is appropriate for this study to be conducted which allows gathering of
information regarding metacognitive strategy in the context of matriculation academic setting.
The current study will be involving students from the two-year program (Program Dua Tahun-
PDT) intake 2017/2018 which are currently in their third semester. By establishing variations
in metacognition strategies among these biology students, I hope to gain insight on the
developmental process which takes place as students develops metacognition skills. This
information later can be utilised by lecturer and the college management in helping students to
develop their metacognitive strategies. Therefore, this study will ask the following research
questions:

When do student makes appraisal to their learning strategy?
What cause student to make changes to their learning strategy based on the appraisal?
What barriers do student face when trying to change their strategy based on the appraisal?

METHODOLOGY

Participants selection (Sampling)

In this research, I will be collecting data at Labuan Matriculation College (KML). The
students are those from the PDT-DB035 Biology course (which means that there are in their
third semester). The sampling technique used was convenience sampling where participants
were chosen based on practicality such as willingness, accessibility and availability (Dörnyei,
2007). Thus, the main limitation from this research is its high degree of bias and generalization
should not be made to the population (Mackey & Gass, 2005). 40 students from my own

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