The Development of an Instructional Model based on Work-Based Learning to Improve the Metacognitive Skills

The objectives of this study were (1) to study the factors that affect the development of metacognitive skills, (2) to develop an instructional model for improving metacognitive skills based on work-based learning, and (3) to compare students' metacognitive skills before and after using the work-based learning instructional model. The sample group was 40 students from the highway engineering supervision major of Qinghai Communications Technical College. The research was conducted in three steps- studying the factors that affect the development of metacognitive skills, developing the instructional model, and the experimental and improvement process. The research instruments were a questionnaire about factors that affect the development of metacognitive skills, an interview form about factors that affect the development of college students' metacognitive skills, an observation form about student behavior, an interview form about opinions on teaching, lesson plans, and a metacognitive skills test. The study's results were 1) the main factors affecting the development of metacognitive skills include the learning process, the environment, the teachers, and the students, respectively, 2) the instructional model based on work-based learning was developed consisting of four core components- a) principles, b) objectives, c) learning process, and d) results, and 3) after the implementation of the instructional model based on work-based learning, the metacognitive skill scores of the students were higher than the metacognitive skills of the students before the experiment, with a statistical significance of 0.01 level.