Cognitive Skills in Adolescents’ Self-Directed Learning Efficacy

Abstract

Hands-on science lessons to motivate and engage students as well as to enhance self-directed learning (SDL) have been suggested as the main goals of the 21 st century through the knowledge-in-use perspective. Compared to conventional learning methods, SDL requires more advanced self-directedness and critical thinking skills applied by learners to conceptualize properly in sub-tasks to reach the relevant final conclusions. Achieving this requires one’s sophisticated executive functions to choose the best alternative , because proper processing is enabled only by resisting mental distractions and inhibiting prepotent answers. The aforementioned skills, however, markedly vary among school students, as they are still in the stage of normal maturing. Thus, possible individual and gender-based differences among school-age learners should be studied more carefully, as the majority of the SDL suggestions have been given based on adult learners. To enhance scientific literacy and explore the learners’ individual characteristics for that, we conducted a study of self-directed outdoor learning with school students aged 15 y (N = 82) examining their evidence-based concept construction in a real-life context. We measured : 1 ) participants’ cognitive executive skills, and 2 ) their prior and post-knowledge levels; with both variables compared also by gender. The results showed differences in participants’ knowledge acquisition trajectories and relations between their prior and post-knowledge as well as individual characteristics in predicting the outcome of self-directed learning (SDL). Further research on the heightened cognitive demand accompanying complex learning is needed in order to implement SDL efficiently.