A Study On Postgraduates' Use Of Metacognitive Strategies In Writing Literature Review

Many graduate students in universities choose to pursue a master's degree with the hope and goal of improving their professional ability,academic ability and research ability in the process.Academic dissertation is a very important academic output of postgraduates,and literature review writing is one of the most important and basic parts of academic dissertation.The writing of literature review in postgraduate academic thesis deserves our attention.Writing the literature review of academic thesis,especially the master's dissertation,is a rather time-consuming and complicated process,including reading the literature,sorting out what you have read,understanding related researches in the field,and writing the literature review.The use of metacognitive strategies in reading and writing is a common research topic in the field of metacognition.Therefore,the researcher uses the application of metacognitive strategies as an entry point to study the literature review writing of postgraduate students,and explores how postgraduate students use metacognitive strategies in literature review writing.Two postgraduate students majoring in Curriculum and Instruction in a university in Shanghai were selected as the research subjects of this case study.Qualitative data was collected by means of think-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews,and then qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis were both conducted.Each subject had two think-aloud interview and two retrospective interviews respectively.Before the think-aloud interviews,relevant training and guidance were conducted to ensure that the interview results were valid and the data collection was complete.The results of the study show that both postgraduates used a large number of metacognitive strategies in the process of literature review writing,including planning strategies,monitoring strategies,evaluation strategies,attention selection,analytical strategies,reference strategies,preparation strategies,and transposition strategies.Among these categories,the last four are newly summarized by the researcher in this study.The study also finds that the types and times of metacognitive strategies used by the two subjects in literature review writing were quite different,and that the metacognitive strategies used in the literature reading,document grooming,and review writing stages were also different.Through interviews,the researcher also learn that both of the research subjects believed that the use of metacognitive strategies in the literature review writing process had influenced and helped them.Based on the above findings,several suggestions are put forward for the use of metacognitive strategies in literature review writing.Consciously and rationally using metacognitive strategies in literature review writing can help graduate students to write better literature reviews,improve their thesis and academic ability.