The Impact of The Metacognitive 7E Learning Cycle on Students’ Epistemological Understandings

This study investigated the effect of metacognitively stimulated 7E learning cycle on tenth grade students’ epistemological understandings in physics. The participants of the study included 107 (49 Female, 58 Male) tenth grade students at two public high schools in Ankara. A quasi-experimental with matching-only pretest-posttest control group design was employed. Two intact classes of each school were randomly assigned to the experimental and control group. The experimental group was instructed based on the metacognitive 7E learning cycle while the control group was taught with the teacher-centered instruction. The Turkish Physics Expectation Survey was applied to probe the students’ epistemological understandings in physics. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was employed to examine the effect of the instruction relied on the metacognitive 7E learning cycle on the students’ epistemological understandings when their pre-epistemological understandings were controlled. The result indicated that there was a significant difference between two groups’ post epistemological understandings in favor of the experimental group.