Metacognition in the leadership classroom: a study of the efficacy of metacognitive instructional strategies for content knowledge acquisition

Metacognition is broadly defined as “one's knowledge concerning one's own cognitive processes, or anything related to them, e.g., the learning-relevant properties of information or data” (Flavell, 1976, p. 232). In the intervening years, metacognition has been studied widely in scholastic settings and metacognitive capacity building has proven to be a valuable pedagogical tool across a wide variety of disciplines and subject matters. That value has come in a range of forms, including students developing better learning strategies, gaining specific content knowledge and better understanding themselves as learners (Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, & Norman, 2010; Schraw, Crippen, & Hartley, 2006; Steiner, 2016; Volpe-White, 2024). There is not, however, a large body of published, quantitative research examining metacognition and its value to leadership learners. The research study explored in this article aims to start to fill that gap in the research literature and expose leadership educators to metacognitive pedagogical strategies and tools they may find useful with leadership learners.

The specific research question this study poses is “does metacognitive instruction support leadership learner content knowledge acquisition?”. Using a quasi-experimental design and quantitative analysis, this research study examines the potential capacity of engaging metacognitive instructional strategies for improving student content knowledge acquisition within a Leadership Studies context. This article will give an overview of metacognition, the theoretical and conceptual frameworks needed to engage in metacognition in a learning environment and discuss some specific metacognitive instructional strategies before exploring the specific design, results and interpretation of the findings from this research study. The article will conclude with an accounting of the limitations of this study, specifically, scholarship involving teaching and learning, generally, and a discussion of ideas for further research involving metacognition in leadership education contexts.

There is a large and growing body of research demonstrating the benefit to students learning about metacognition and experiencing metacognitively-focused instruction. Broadly speaking, engaging in metacognitive learning experiences has been shown to produce baseline improvements in academic achievement and core skills like reading comprehension (Gourgey, 2001; Loper & Murphy, 1985). Additionally, research across academic levels has shown that attention to metacognition in instruction has led to better learning strategies, knowledge construction and increased problem-solving ability (Carr & Jessup, 1996; Kauffman, Ge, Xie, & Chen, 2008; Pugalee, 2001; Schurter, 2002; Stillman & Galbraith, 1998; Zan, 2000); as well as produces longer retention and deeper understanding of concepts (Blank, 2000; Georghiades, 2000, 2004). Of particular interest in this research study, Schraw et al. (2006) found that metacognitive instruction improved learning more than focusing on only content knowledge (see also, Steiner, 2016), and multiple researchers (Rickey & Stacy, 2000; Rozencwajg, 2003; Steiner, 2016) found that there is a particular benefit to engaging in metacognitive instruction in an interdisciplinary classroom, like a leadership studies classroom, as learners demonstrated greater flexibility and innovation in how knowledge is learned and applied.

Put simply, metacognition is thinking and learning about how one thinks and learns. That may sound simple enough, but it is quite difficult to accomplish in practice because of the uniquely individual, constructed nature of learning and knowledge acquisition (Pintrich, 2002). There is clear evidence that the most effective means of metacognitive capacity building is to teach learners about metacognition and make it an explicit component of instruction (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012; Terlecki & McMahon, 2018). Metacognitive instruction must, then, include some instruction on metacognition itself, and metacognitive activities must have their metacognitive nature explored throughout the process of engaging in the activities. Instruction concerned with metacognitive development should give learners practice in learning how to learn (Schraw et al., 2006). To do this effectively, instruction needs to engage the various types of metacognitive knowledge with which learners engage.

Flavell (1976), one of the pioneering researchers on metacognition, breaks metacognitive knowledge down into three types: strategy, task and person. The “strategy” type is knowledge of approaches for learning, thinking and problem solving that are applicable across all or most knowledge domains (Pintrich, 2002). This aligns particularly well with the general information gathering, critical thinking and analytical reasoning strategies encompassed in most college-level learning and certainly within leadership learning, which commonly asks students to understand, analyze and critique a wide variety of theories, models and approaches to leadership.

The “task” component of metacognition involves learners developing an understanding that under different conditions different strategies may be required to complete specific tasks (Pintrich, 2002). Paris, Lipson, and Wixson (1983) pointed out, learners must develop knowledge about the “when” and “why” of using certain cognitive strategies and develop the flexibility to engage multiple strategies. The task type of metacognitive knowledge speaks to the differences in how disciplines develop, consider data and evidence and propose findings and solutions.

Finally, person encompasses “everything that you could come to believe about the nature of yourself and other people as cognitive processors” (Flavell, 1979, p. 907). New perspectives are built when old assumptions, and how those assumptions were formed, are examined considering new experiences and new knowledge (Dewey, 1986; Flavell, 2004). This focus on person demonstrates that metacognitive instruction focuses just as much on the learner understanding oneself as it does on understanding the content they are studying. This has major implications for leadership learners as most leadership programs, regardless of their specific nature (leadership studies, leadership development, etc.), engage in a significant number of activities that help learners better understand themselves as leaders, followers and their fluid leadership roles as situations and contexts change.

Teaching with metacognitive instructional strategies requires a grounding in psychology-based learning theories and educational philosophies that foreground the learner and their cognitive capacity for learning in the learning process. Instruction must be learner-centered first, as opposed to content focused or problem focused, with content knowledge and problem-solving following from the focus on the learner. Learner-centered instruction engages students to be active participants in the learning process. It encourages students to have a role in how content is discussed and explored. It should foster collaboration and aid students in reflecting on what they have learned and how they have learned it, so that those learning skills can be transferrable to settings outside the classroom (Weimer, 2013).

Learner-centered instruction does not so much deemphasize content or the problem being taught but rather emphasizes the learner's role in the process of understanding that content or problem. There are, though, multiple methods to achieve this. In my own teaching and for this research study, my learner-centered approach engages in metacognitive instruction based in constructivism and experiential learning theory.

Constructivism, broadly speaking, is a theory of knowledge that states that individuals play an active role in crafting their own understanding of an idea or a phenomenon. Based on this construction, each individual experiences a unique reality; that reality is developed through knowledge gained in past experiences and can be altered by engaging in and analyzing new experiences (Piaget, 1971; Von Glasersfeld, 2013; Vygotsky, 1978). Constructivism is a counter to empiricism, which views the reality of an idea or a phenomenon as objective and independent of observation (Larochelle & Bednarz, 1998).

Constructivism does not eschew scientific fact or argue that there cannot be common knowledge, like the leadership content knowledge that is ultimately at the center of this research study, but it does require an examination of how those facts and knowledge were developed. As O'Connor (2022) points out, “theories associated with a constructivist tradition cannot be separated from understandings of the ways in which knowledge is produced, engaged with, and constructed by people within particular contexts and at particular times” (p. 413). Even academic disciplines, including Leadership Studies, are human constructions (Phillips, 1995).

Constructivism, then, embraces the uniqueness of how the individual experiences and interprets fact and common knowledge and interrogates how that fact and knowledge was developed in the first place (DeVere Wolsey, Lapp, Grant, & Karkouti, 2019; O'Connor, 2022; Sample, 2020; Tormey, Liddy, & Hogan, 2009). For example, constructivism allows that both heterarchical and hierarchal organizational structures are valid approaches to the distribution of authority within an organization. Before instituting either structure in a particular organization, however, constructivists would first seek to understand the values, traditions, mechanisms and potential outcomes that come with each authority structure. Moreover, different constructivists may differ widely on interpreting which authority structure should be instituted in a particular organization. Constructivism is as much about how a person understands knowledge as it is about the nature of the knowledge itself (Vygotsky, 1978). It is at this junction between knowledge and the individual that we see that metacognition and metacognitive instruction can be accessed using a constructivist approach to learning.

Given the many ways metacognition can be engaged – strategy, task and person – and given that it must be an explicit component of instruction, bringing metacognition into the classroom is no easy task. A metacognitive/constructivist approach to teaching foregrounds the learner, not the content or the teacher. Instead, instruction must actively engage students' own knowledge construction. The role of the teacher becomes that of a facilitator, instead of lecturer, and the role of student becomes that of a learner, instead of knowledge recipient (Barr & Tagg, 1995; Biggs, 2014; O'Connor, 2022).

To do this, learners, then, are required to actively engage in the issues they are studying and to critically examine their own learning of these issues. Not all instructional models are conducive to such a process. Experiential learning, however, is a pedagogical framework that has learners build knowledge through actively engaging in hands-on or real-world activities and scenarios related to course content (Dewey, 1986). This pedagogical approach is widely supported in the research literature with studies showing benefits to student knowledge acquisition, academic achievement and satisfaction and interest in and motivation to learn (see Ambrose et al., 2010; Friedman & Goldbaum, 2016; Kong, 2021; Villarroel, Benavente, Chuecas, & Bruna, 2020; Yin, 2018; Zelechoski, Riggs Romaine, & Wolbransky, 2017).

There are different approaches to experiential learning (e.g., inquiry-, or problem-based learning; see Carr and Jessup, 1996), but as Kolb (1984) argues with his Experiential Learning Model, critical self-reflection is a crucial component to the experiential learning process. Critical reflection, Kolb (1984) states, is what transforms an experience into new knowledge and is what sets the foundation for potential learning to occur in the next novel experience. Further, it must be carried out as a deliberative practice. Metacognitive instruction follows these same lines of reasoning and is why Kolb and Kolb (2017) built metacognition into their experiential learning model. Additionally, since leadership studies is an applied field where regular attention is paid to learners developing their own acumen as not just leaders but contributors to leadership contexts, the Experiential Learning Model makes for a useful pedagogical framework for metacognitive-focused leadership instruction. Experiential learning is not occurring if that learning is not metacognitive and constructivist in nature, and metacognitive instruction is not occurring if it is not explicit and experiential in nature. While this focus on the self is potentially beneficial in many ways to the learner, the question this research study wants to explore is whether this metacognitively-focused approach to leadership instruction specifically helps students learn leadership content.

This research study assessed undergraduate students in the required introductory course of the Leadership Studies minor at a large, public, research-intensive institution in the southeast United States. The demographics of this institution are quite diverse with a near even split between male and female identities and between majority and minority racial and ethnic identities. The Leadership Studies program, and thus the students participating in this study, mimic the demographics of the institution.

The Leadership Studies minor is a distinctive minor that offers learners a rigorous and robust exploration of the Leadership Studies discipline. It is a five-course, 15-credit hour minor that pulls in students from majors across the university with students most commonly coming from majors in Interdisciplinary Studies, Health Sciences, Marketing, Psychology and Environmental Studies, the majority of which have not previously taken any leadership focused courses. The minor has an integrative approach to learning that explores leadership within and across disciplines and engages experiential learning by putting students in positions to apply leadership theory and core concepts into practice in every course.

The Leadership Studies minor has several program-level, learning outcome goals ranging in purpose from students learning more about their own leadership behaviors in various leadership situations to exploring leadership in the contexts of race, gender and culture. All the program's learning outcome goals are introduced in this foundational course, but two of the goals serve as the foci of the course:

1. Explain the fundamental concepts of leadership and the characteristics of leaders and followers.

2. Appraise and critique different leadership theories, models and approaches.

The program emphasizes these two goals in the introductory course because learners will need the content knowledge built into these goals to help them as they advance through the rest of the coursework in the minor, and, hopefully, in applying what we teach in real-world situations.

Due to the importance the program places on them, this study sought to examine how well our students were learning the content knowledge related to these two learning outcome goals. Using a quasi-experimental design that is common in leadership education research, participants were placed into a comparison group or an intervention group based on the course section for which the participants registered. All courses met for equivalent lengths of time, and the same activities and assignments were completed. All courses followed the same scaffolded structure in terms of content, and both groups spent equivalent time engaging in experiential and interactive instruction. Both groups spent considerable time on reflection.

The only difference between the two groups was the explicit inclusion of metacognition in the intervention group. The comparison group received instruction that was interactive in its approach with ample time given to discussion and direct engagement with concepts. Multiple opportunities were given to reflect on the material. The intervention group received similar instruction, but they also received explicit metacognitive components to activities. In this study, I chose to focus in on a few very specific metacognitive instructional strategies--explicit metacognitive instruction; think, pair, share…reflect; metacognitive prompting and critical, reflective journaling (for a more comprehensive listing of metacognitive instructional strategies, see Ambrose et al., 2010; Schraw, 1998; Tanner, 2012). Below is a sampling of activities and assignments built into both comparison and intervention groups with an explanation of how the intervention group had metacognition woven into the course:

1. Students regularly engaged in activities that required them to engage in “think, pair, share…reflect” (Schraw et al., 2006; Steiner, 2016). The activity that I began the course with as a way of introducing metacognition and leadership is the classic “Draw Leadership” activity (Brooks & Chapman, 2018), but I conducted it in the think, pair, share…reflect approach. Each student was first required to spend time thinking on their own about what is leadership, then pair up with a couple of other students to discuss their thoughts and draw leadership based on their collective thoughts. Next the small group shared their drawing and the explanation of the drawing with the whole class, at which point the class and I critiqued their understanding of leadership. Finally, each individual student reflected on why they thought leadership was what it was and why they chose the symbols they did to draw it.

For the intervention group, significant, explicit time was spent after the completion of the drawing exercise explaining how it was an act of metacognitive capacity building. This included a comprehensive lecture on the concept of metacognition and the science behind it. The comparison group completed the same activity, but without attention being paid to the metacognitive purpose behind the activity. During the time the intervention group explored and learned more about metacognition, the comparison group received further commentary from me about how their drawings related to leadership theories and models they would be learning about throughout the course.

1. Either weekly or for every course module (depending on whether it was a four-week or fifteen-week course), students engaged in reflective journaling that asked them to explore leadership concepts in relation to real-world examples, including examples from their own lives. For the intervention group, students answered these questions:

   • Summarize the content from the previous week. Be comprehensive (consider overall themes, specific models/approaches/ideas and strengths and critiques).

   • What was the most confusing element of the material for you from this week? Try to explain it.

   • How has the previous week's material changed your understanding of leadership? Explain.

   • Equate the previous week's material to a leadership situation you were in. Tell the story of what happened in that situation using the language of the previous week's material.

   • What about your preparation for class and learning this material went well? What could you have done differently or better?

Participants in the comparison group also completed these journals, though their journals only included the first four questions. Additionally, participants in the intervention group received an explanation of how this exercise, in general, and the last four questions, specifically, were metacognitive in nature, while the comparison group did not receive this explanation.

1. Every class period or weekly module was infused with critical self-reflection and metacognitive prompts to aid students in engaging the content more deeply and personally. Examples of the types of questions posed to students, included:

   • What assumptions did you make throughout this process? How did your beliefs, values or preferences inform your thinking? Your participation?

   • What assumptions did you make about others in the process? What thinking led to these assumptions?

   • What role did your identity play in navigating this experience? How did identity influence how you made meaning of the experience?

   • How was leadership demonstrated during this experience? What prototypes are operating that led you to label this experience as leadership? What thinking led to those prototypes?

   • What went unspoken or unaddressed, but still influenced the process?

   • If you were to adopt an identity or position different than your own, what might you see differently that is unspoken or unaddressed? How does your thinking inform what you see?

Again, these questions, or equivalent ones, were asked of participants in both groups. It was only in the intervention group, however, that attention was explicitly given to the metacognitive nature of the questioning, and forced participants to reckon with their current and past thinking and learning processes in relation to the material covered in this course.

In both the comparison and intervention groups, effort was made to create an atmosphere of deliberative and thoughtful reflection and critique of the self, the content and the relationship between the self and the content. It was only in the intervention group, however, that that effort was explicitly explored as metacognitive instruction.

This study used sections of the introductory course as they were available to the instructor/researcher. The study took place from 2020–2024 and included in-person and online sections of the course with the online sections being either four-week summer session courses or fifteen-week semester courses and the in-person courses being fifteen-week semester courses. More sections of the course received intervention treatment, but modalities and course lengths were spread across both groups. As students/participants could not be randomly assigned to take this introductory course or specific sections of the course, and because the classroom cannot mimic the complete control of variables that can occur in a laboratory setting, the quasi-experimental, comparison/intervention design was chosen for this study.

To assess content knowledge acquisition, both groups received a pre- and post-test (the same test was given as both the pre-test and the post-test) consisting of 40 specific questions on content that would be discussed throughout the course (contact the author for a full list of the questions). The questions were originally developed for the instructional support materials for Peter Northouse's Leadership: Theory & Practice, 8^th Edition (2018) and were assessed by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accrediting organization. Most questions had a difficulty rating of easy or moderate, with a few considered difficult, which aligned with the instructor/researcher's expected level of student understanding in an introductory course. Additionally, all questions represented a cognitive domain of either Knowledge, Comprehension, Analysis, Application or Reflection, again at levels appropriate for an introductory course. Here is a sample question used in the pre- and post-test:

Social judgment skill is similar to ______.

• A. sociability in trait approach

• B. Katz's human skill

• C. Katz's technical skill

• D. knowledge in Mumford's model

Ans: B

Cognitive Domain: Analysis

Answer Location: Competencies

Difficulty Level: Moderate

Students were instructed to do the best they could on the pre- and post-test but not to use anything but their own knowledge to answer the questions. Students were given a completion grade for submitting the pre-test and the post-test and were explicitly told they would not be evaluated on how well they did on the test. Additionally, no specific question was ever discussed in class, though, again, the course did cover all the content explored in the questions (plus a great deal more).

Basic statistical analyses, including the Levene's test for equality of variance, paired t-test, unpaired t-test and Cohen's d and Hedges' g effect size tests, were carried out to evaluate the differences in student content knowledge between pre- and post-tests and between comparison and intervention groups. Levene's test for equality of variance was used to determine if the scores on the pre-test in the comparison and intervention groups were sufficiently equivalent to be compared using the t-tests. Paired t-tests were used to compare the means of the same group (either comparison group or intervention group) after participants completed the pre-test and the post-test. An unpaired t-test was used to compare the means of the differences between pre- and post-test scores within the intervention and comparison groups. Cohen's d and Hedges' G effect size tests were used to determine the statistical strength of the relationship between the difference in means between the comparison and intervention groups.

Please note that while t-tests can evaluate differences between groups and whether those differences are statistically significant, and effect size tests can determine the strength of the relationship between the differences in the populations, they cannot determine causality. This will be discussed in greater detail in the limitations/implications section. Finally, please note that while comparison group is smaller than the intervention group, it is sufficiently large enough and close enough in size to the intervention group to be analyzed using these tests. A larger comparison group size with similar descriptive statistics would only strengthen the results explored in the next section.

Prior to engaging in the previously discussed statistical tests, some basic descriptive statistics were collected. Table 1 contains the comparison group's pre- and post-test scores and the mean and standard deviation changes between those scores. Table 2 contains the intervention group's pre- and post-test scores, and the mean and standard deviation changes between those scores.

These raw statistics suggest that instruction did improve scoring in both groups and that there is potentially a difference in achievement between the comparison and intervention groups, but the significance of these differences needs to be determined. First Levene's Test was run to determine if the comparison and intervention groups had sufficiently similar pre-test scores to be compared via additional statistical tests. The results showed that there was not a statistically significant difference in the variances between the groups (F = 1.3769; p = 0.2424), meaning the two groups are sufficiently homogenous to be further compared.

Before comparing the groups, though, within-subject, Paired T-Tests were run to see if there was a change in mean score between the pre-test and the post-test within each group. The comparison group showed an extremely statistically significant increase in mean score between the pre-test and the post-test (p < 0.0001) as did the intervention group (p < 0.0001). This is not surprising as both the comparison and intervention groups did receive instruction on the subject matter tested in the pre- and post-test.

Next, the between-subjects analysis was conducted. The means of the differences in pre-test to post-test scores for the comparison and intervention groups were then compared using an Unpaired t-Test. The results of this test found a statistically significant difference (p = 0.0120) between the two groups, meaning there is a low likelihood that the difference in scores between groups occurred by chance. The effect size of the difference between these two groups was then calculated to determine the relative strength of their relationship. The effect size was calculated two ways (Cohen's d = 0.416; Hedges' G = 0.435), both of which suggest a moderate-level strength in the relationship between the difference in scoring on the post-tests in the comparison and intervention groups. When the statistically significant result on the Unpaired t-Test is combined with the moderate effect size found using Cohen's d and Hedges' G, there is a reasonable argument to be made that metacognitive instruction had a beneficial impact on student learning leadership content in the intervention group.

This study was focused on examining the potential benefit of using metacognitive instructional strategies to improve leadership learners' content knowledge acquisition. The results of this study suggest that within the context of this study, instruction that is broadly learner-focused, engaged and experiential in nature did improve student learning of leadership content. More notable is the fact that it also appears that metacognitive instruction may have improved student learning of leadership content more effectively than did non-metacognitive instruction. This set of findings broadly supports the larger body of research exploring the benefits of constructivism and experiential learning (see Ambrose et al., 2010; Friedman & Goldbaum, 2016; Kong, 2021; Villarroel et al., 2020; Yin, 2018; Zelechoski et al., 2017) and supports the larger body of literature on metacognitive instruction. Specifically, it supports previous findings that there is a benefit to explicit discussions of metacognition in instruction (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), that when metacognitive instruction is carried out in specific course contexts, it can improve content knowledge acquisition more than instruction that focuses only on content knowledge (Schraw et al., 2006; Steiner, 2016), and that learners demonstrated greater flexibility and innovation in how knowledge is learned and applied, which is particular beneficial interdisciplinary spaces, like a leadership studies classroom (Rickey & Stacy, 2000; Rozencwajg, 2003).

Ultimately, the findings from this study support the larger body of research on the value of metacognitive instruction to improve student learning, in general, but specifically related to content knowledge acquisition (Ambrose et al., 2010). In addition, this study adds to the nascent research on metacognitive instruction in the leadership classroom. I would caution, however, against making any bold claims about the efficacy of metacognitively-focused instruction over other forms of instruction for leadership learning, based solely on this research study.

To start, this research study has the same limitations inherent in any study conducted outside of a laboratory. It cannot be randomized and not all variables can be controlled for. In short, while classrooms are an excellent, available space in which instructor–researchers can conduct research, the studies produced will lack generalizability and can, at best, determine correlation, not causality (Chick, 2014). This study is no different. First, this study was quasi-experimental in design. As a researcher, I could not control for who enrolled in my courses and for who ended up in either the comparison or intervention groups. Related to this, the study could never have a true experimental design because I could not have a true control group. Students who chose to enroll in these courses did so, presumably, because they wanted to learn about leadership, and so still deserved my best effort as an instructor, regardless of how it might impact the study. To this end, it is likely the comparison group received some metacognitive instruction from me, though the term was never explicitly used in those courses. Additionally, because I could not have a true control group, I could not control for all potential variables between groups. I was able to determine that there is a relationship between instructional type and content knowledge acquisition but not the specific nature of that relationship.

Another issue that I experienced with this study that is also quite common across classroom or course-based research is that I did not have complete control over when and in what modality I taught the course I used for this study (Chick, 2014). The sections of the courses used in this study were taught either in-person or asynchronous online with the in-person sections always being fifteen weeks in length and the online sections being either fifteen weeks or four weeks. I did make sure that both the comparison and intervention groups contained at least one section of both in-person and online courses, but a truer experimental design would have tried to have both groups under the same exact set of conditions. That simply was not possible here.

In digging into the details of this study, there are more limitations to expose. The most notable is the amount of data cleaning I had to do prior to analysis. I removed the data from any participants if they completed the pre-test but not the post-test or the post-test, but not the pre-test; if they submitted the same exact answers to both the pre-test and post-test; or if they clearly did not try on the post-test (for example, marking “C” as the answer to all 40 questions). The first two reasons are understandable and clear cut. As a researcher, you want data that accurately represents the full work of the participants. It is the second two reasons that were more troubling and engaged more subjective determinations than I would have preferred as the researcher.

The post-test, for all sections of the comparison and intervention groups, was always uploaded through an online submission, and for the courses taught as online courses, so was the pre-test. This made it very easy for any participants who were so inclined to not try hard or, at all, on the post-test and still receive class credit. Remember, the students received class credit if they submitted the pre- and post-tests; they were not graded. Unfortunately, in my determination, several students did not try on the post-test.

The silver lining is that the number of participants I had to remove from the comparison and intervention groups was roughly equivalent. The comparison group had 11 participants removed (17.5% of the original comparison cohort; five were removed for either not completing the pre-test or post-test and six were removed for either submitting the same exact answers to both tests or not trying on one or both of tests) and the intervention group, which had roughly double the number of overall participants, had 24 participants removed (18.5% of the original intervention cohort; 10 were removed for either not completing the pre-test or post-test and 14 were removed for either submitting the same exact answers to both tests or not trying on one or both of tests). This rough equivalency allows me to still draw statistically significant conclusions from this study, but it also must be stated that if all participants had successfully completed both the pre- and post-test and tried their best on both, the findings could have shifted in either a positive or negative direction in relation to the efficacy of metacognitive instruction.

There is a growing body of literature examining the role of metacognition in leadership education. Volpe-White (2024) provides a comprehensive overview of both the potential benefits of metacognition to leadership learning and how metacognition has previously been discussed and studied in relation to leadership education. Volpe-White pays particular attention to the excellent leadership learning framework (see Guthrie & Jenkins, 2018), which places metacognition at the center of leadership learning, and provides numerous examples of how metacognition can be engaged in the leadership classroom (see also Black, Soto, & Spurlin, 2016; Brooks & Chapman, 2018; Brooks, Schaab, & Chapman, 2019; Dugan & Humbles, 2018).

What is less well-developed in the leadership literature, however, is systematic research focused on the potential impact specific metacognitive instructional strategies can have on specific learning outcomes in leadership education. The findings from this study support the larger body of research on the value and benefit of engaging metacognitive instructional strategies to improve student learning (Ambrose et al., 2010; Schraw, 1998), but one of my main objectives in conducting this study was to examine if my specific metacognitive instructional strategies would benefit my program's specific learning goals. I chose to focus on the specific learning outcome goals my program has related to content knowledge acquisition, but we have other, more praxis-oriented, leader identity development and collaborative/group outcomes that could also potentially benefit from metacognitive instruction. Additionally, I chose to focus in on a few very specific metacognitive instructional strategies – explicit metacognitive instruction; think, pair, share…reflect; metacognitive prompting and critical, reflective journaling – but there are many other metacognitive instructional strategies that could be assessed in relation to specific learning outcomes that may be more or less impactful than the ones I engaged in this study. As discussed in the limitations section, doing this kind of quasi-experimental research may hinder the generalizability of the findings, but, conversely, they may provide profoundly valuable insights into our own, unique programs.

To this end, my first recommendation is that leadership educators should use their classrooms for research. While not true laboratories, practitioners can become researchers by collecting data on the work they are already doing or on new ideas they have for the classroom. Surveys, focus groups and pre-/post-tests are simple, but effective means of learning more about what and how well students are learning. There does not need to be a divide between leadership educators and researchers; in fact, the discipline would be best served, in my opinion, if, whenever possible, we took on both roles.

Moving to concrete recommendations related to the findings of this study, I would recommend other leadership educators/researchers try to replicate the basic parameters of this study in their unique contexts (the full list of questions used in the pre- and post-test is available upon request). Undoubtedly, other programs do not use the same exact language we use for our learning outcomes, but it is likely most programs have outcomes related to content knowledge. The greater the replicability, the more generalizable these findings become. Second, I would recommend educators/researchers craft similar studies in design that use different metacognitive strategies – perhaps ones they are already using in their classrooms – to those with which I engaged in this study. Again, it is possible that different metacognitive strategies could elicit better, or worse results related to similar program learning outcomes. Third, I would recommend educators/researchers develop similar studies that dive deeper into the value of metacognitive instruction for leadership learning in different instructional modalities. My next study will focus on this, but the relative benefits of various types of instructional modalities is a heavy area of debate in higher education and would benefit from being examined by a wide array of voices coming from a wide variety of institutional contexts. Next, it would be wonderful if leadership educators/researchers had access to a “leadership lab”, in which they could conduct these types of studies in a more controlled environment that would not be subject to the limitations discussed in the previous section.

Staying within leadership learning, but moving away from content knowledge acquisition, future research using both quantitative and qualitative measures should explore other potential benefits to metacognitive instruction. Leader identity development (broadly, and within the many theories/models that engage in this work), follower identity development, group dynamics, conflict resolution, negotiation and coalition building are just a few of the leadership-related areas where better knowledge about oneself and of how one understands and processes information could prove beneficial. Additionally, there would be value in studying if different identity groups respond differently to metacognitively focused leadership instruction. Finally, there is a growing body of research examining the benefits of metacognition to group instruction (see Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002; Van De Bogart, Dounas-Frazer, Lewandowski, & Stetzer, 2017). As leadership is a process that occurs within a group setting, there is a benefit to attempting to research the value of explicit metacognitive instruction to not just individual development, but group development, as well.

This research study sought to explore the potential efficacy of engaging in metacognitive instructional strategies for Leadership Studies content knowledge acquisition. While causality could not be determined in a quasi-experimental study of this nature, the findings do suggest a positive, beneficial relationship between metacognitive instruction and student leadership content learning. Though more research should be conducted to attempt to replicate the findings presented here, this study, combined with the extensive research showing the value of metacognitive instruction to critical self-reflection and self-knowledge, suggests that metacognitive instruction can be a valuable pedagogical strategy in the leadership classroom.