METACOGNITION AND PROBLEM-SOLVING - A PROCESS-ORIENTED APPROACH

Four studies were conducted to demonstrate that the positive effects of verbalization on solution transfer found in previous studies were not due to verbalization per se but to the metacognitive processing involved in the effort required to produce explanations for solution behaviors. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, a distinction was made between process-oriented, problem-oriented, and simple ''think aloud'' verbalizations. The process-oriented (metacognitive) solvers performed significantly better than nonprocess control groups on both training and transfer tasks. Experiment 4 further demonstrated this effect by showing that process-oriented participants consistently form more sophisticated problem representations and develop more complex strategies.