Date of Conferral

3-13-2025

Degree

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

School

Education

Advisor

Michael Vinella

Abstract

The administration at a Mid-Atlantic regional community college in the United States created a strategic plan to increase students’ critical thinking and metacognition skills by focusing on improving students’ problem-solving skills with problem-based learning. However, the problem in this study was that the faculty’s fidelity of implementation (FOI) a strategic plan to implement metacognition instruction at a community college in the Mid-Atlantic U. S. region had not been effectively monitored. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to investigate the FOI of metacognitive instruction to a strategic plan as perceived by the community college’s science faculty. Century et al.’s FOI framework outlined the focus of this study and guided the research question of how the college’s science instructors perceived the FOI of metacognitive instruction according to the strategic plan’s intended outcomes. Semistructured interview data from 10 science department faculty were thematically analyzed using a priori, open, and axial coding. The findings included three themes: (a) although they worked to elicit metacognition from students, instructors reported little improvement in student metacognition; (b) instructors indicated that mandatory, science content-specific training would be valuable for implementation and assessment of learning; and (c) although instructors valued the plan’s goals and used their judgment to use materials and assignments to benefit students, they indicated a lack of direction for implementation This study may affect positive social change by providing community college leaders with information on why the strategic plan did not reach its goals and recommendations to bridge the gap between what was intended and what was implemented in the plan.

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