Metacognition, motivation and self-efficacy in a socio-cognitive online environment. First results of a survey at the University of Pisa

Abstract

In the knowledge society the processes of learning and of knowledge management take place, very often, online and in social online environments, thus producing issues of complexity and sustainability, related to cognitive processes of learning, that students - even at university level - are not always able to understand and / or to deal with. As a matter of fact, although many universities are beginning to introduce them into their courses, social networks are not yet perceived as learning tools and the use that students make of them is still limited to entertainment and to communicative tasks. This study reports the case of a Management course at the University of Pisa, where the institutional VLE – based on Moodle – has been integrated with a student support group hosted on Ning. A survey has been administered to a sample of 220 Management Engineering students, in order to study the role of metacognitive, motivational and socio-cognitive variables in student self-efficacy perception towards academic success and in their ability to make an ‘effective’ use of ICT for learning. The first results of the survey are reported and discussed.