Use these interactive videos to help first year students transition from high school.

Note: this work was presented at ASEE 2020 under the paper name "Developing Metacognition in First-Year Students through Interactive Online Videos" (paper ID 30948) in the "First-Year Programs: Metacognition, Self-Efficacy, and Motivation #2" session (session ID R327E).

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Recognizing that many of our first year engineering students were struggling with the transition from the high school learning environment, a suite of online, interactive video resources were developed.  Created by an engineering faculty member as 8- to -12 minutes narrated PowerPoint "screencasts," the resources also included quizzes, games, and other activities to add interest and engagement.  Under the general theme of "transitioning to university learning," a total of nine integrated and interrelated packages covered material on learning perspectives and metacognition were created.

1. Growth Mindset and Grit: how our perspective towards our ability to change our brain, coupled with our passion and perseverance towards a topic, matter more than almost anything else. 
2. Learning Perspectives: Bloom's Taxonomy of learning levels and Perry's Scheme of intellectual development help put university learning in perspective. 
3. How Learning Works - Neuroscience: the science of learning, and, specifically, how the brain stores information, and what makes for more robust, longer-lasting learning. Also discussed is why cramming doesn't work and why sleep is essential for learning.
4. How Learning Works - Memory: this builds on the previous topic to view learning from the perspective of memory: how we take in information, store it in short- and long-term memory, and how we retrieve it.  Also covered is how we forget, and what we can do to minimize this. 
5. How Learning Works - Focus: completing the three part How Learning Works series, this one discusses why focus and attention are so important for learning.  The myth of multitasking is dispelled, with a game to test how good a multitasker you are
6. Healthy Body, Healthy Brain: research-based best practices relating to sleep, diet, and exercise to improve learning for university students are presented. 
7. Understanding and Managing Stress: stress is unavoidable, but it is not necessarily a bad thing - in fact it is essential.  The origins of stress are discussed with some strategies for managing stress when it becomes too much.
8. Metacognition: often described as "thinking about thinking," this topic involves being aware of and regulating how we learn.  Those with a high degree of metacognition tend to do better in university.  Previous topics are revisited, now with a name to give to what was covered and why it was included.   
9. Implementation: the final topics ties together the ideas from the entire series, implementing the various ideas into a set of evidence-based learning strategies.  Included are an approach to time management for studying, and a game to challenge your learning.

Click a title above to see the associated materials, or go to bit.ly/UniversityLearning to view the series with some development notes.

The materials were deployed in a first year introduction to engineering course at the University of British Columbia starting in 2018.  The impacts of the metacognition materials (i.e., screencasts 3, 4, 5, 8 and 9) in particular were studied over two years to reveal the following:

• Independent coders measured a statistically significant increase in metacognitive awareness for students who viewed at least half of the metacognition screencasts.
• Surveys of students indicated statistically significant benefits to beliefs about effective learning practices for those who viewed the screencasts compared to those who did not.
  
• Academic benefits of a relative course grade increase were linearly related to the number of screencasts viewed, reaching approximately 4% the following term (~6 months later) were measured for those viewing all five metacognition screeencasts.