The ability to analyze and evaluate one's own thinking and acquisition of knowledge and skills, or metacognition, is an important set of skills for engineering students to acquire. Metacognition is simply defined as "thinking about thinking" or "cognition about cognition" [8], It is awareness of one's learning processes and regulation of one's learning behaviors [8]. In this paper, we will address two types of metacognitive skills: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation. Flavell [8] described metacognitive knowledge as an individual's knowledge about their own cognitive processes; metacognitive regulation is a process in which individuals monitor, regulate and evaluate cognitive activities to attain particular cognitive goals [25]. Metacognitive skills are related to learning. Students who understand how to apply metacognition to their learning had a better understanding of learning and were more successful [1,9, 17]. Specifically, students' self-awareness of their learning processes facilitated learning and performance [2]. In addition, students' application of metacognitive skills in practice supported students' learning within different contexts and improved their adaptive capabilities within those contexts [23]. Because adaptive capabilities are critical within the engineering workplace, it is important that engineering students learn metacognitive skills necessary to develop adaptive capabilities. The purpose for this work is to examine students' statements about their experiences within engineering competitions and a service-based learning project identifying their metacognitive reflections about their participation in these informal learning environments.
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