Experiential Versus Instructional Approaches for Eliciting Metacognitive Awareness in AI-Assisted Learning

A quasi-experimental, short-term longitudinal study with 126 first-year engineering students comparing two ways of teaching students how to learn with generative AI: an experiential, hands-on session versus a classical instructional lecture. Metacognitive awareness \u2014 both knowledge of cognition (understanding effective AI-use strategies) and regulation of cognition (applying that knowledge in practice) \u2014 was measured before and after a two-hour session and tracked longitudinally. The design directly addresses a gap flagged across the wiki's Metacognition thread: interventions that build awareness of one's own AI-assisted thinking, rather than just policing AI use.\n\nThe study speaks to the Cognitive Offloading and Over Reliance literature by testing whether metacognitive skills for AI-assisted learning are better acquired by doing (experiencing GenAI's strengths and failure modes firsthand) or by being told. It extends AI Metacognition STEM Review with primary quasi-experimental evidence in an engineering-course context and connects to Self Regulated Learning as a proximal training target for durable, transferable AI-use strategies.

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Benazet i Montobbio, P., Rotter, J., & Hern\u00e1ndez-Leo, D. (2026). Experiential Versus Instructional Approaches for Eliciting Metacognitive Awareness in AI-Assisted Learning. arXiv:2607.20047. arXiv preprint (cs.CY/cs.HC).