The metacognitive scaffold: the idea tactics tutorial

We focused the tutorial’s content on research databases that would remain relevant to our users: education graduate students. We believed an education perspective would help sustain their interest and confidence in the tutorial as a learning tool. In addition, we created examples to underscore the importance of metacognition in problem solving. These examples highlight self-regulating learning strategies, monitoring, problem solving, and graduate students’ study habits, as well as the use of database search features in supporting information search. Likewise, we promoted the use of education databases (ERIC, Education Research Complete, Academic Search Premier, and PsychInfo) in our examples, to encourage education graduate students’ use of these resources.