Psychology 2013. Vol.4, No.7, 585-591 Published Online July 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/psych) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/psych.2013.47084 Copyright © 2013 SciRes. 585 Students’ Metacognitive Strategies in the Mathematics Classroom Using Open Approach Ariya Suriyon 1 , Maitree Inprasitha 2 , Kiat Sangaroon 3 1 Doctor of Philosophy Program in Mathematics Education, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, Thailand 2 Center for Research in Mathematics Education, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, Thailand 3 Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, Thailand Email: ariya.su@hotmail.com Received March 24 th , 2013; revised April 25 th , 2013; accepted May 22 nd , 2013 Copyright © 2013 Ariya Suriyon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper describes a study investigating students’ metacognitive behavior and abilities in the math- ematic class using the open approach. Four 1st grade students, ages six to seven years, served as a target group from the primary school having participated since 2006 in the Teacher Professional Development Project with innovation of lesson study and open approach. The research was based on Begle’s conceptual framework (1969), focusing on observing the nature of occurrences in order to describe emerging facts in the class. In addition, the data were examined by triangulation among three sources: video recording, field notes, and students’ written works. Data analysis rested upon 4 open approach-based teaching steps (In- prasitha, 2010). The study results showed that the open approach-based mathematic class helped students exhibit metacognitive behavior and abilities relevant to the four teaching steps: 1) posing open-ended problem, 2) students’ self learning, 3) whole class discussion and comparison, and 4) summarization through connecting students’ mathematical ideas emerging in the classroom. Keywords: Problem Solving; Metacognitive Strategies; Lesson Study; Open Approach Introduction As for significance of problem solving, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) (1989) mentioned in the curriculum standard on the item 1, “mathematics as problem solving”. Also, the NCTM Curriculum and Evaluation Stan- dards obviously demonstrated that mathematics might truly be the best teaching through problem solving situations (Kroll & Miller, 1993), and in problem solving, it is necessary to empha- size mathematics at school levels (NCTM, 1980) in relevance with the study of Inprasitha (1997), concluding in his research that problem solving was fundamental teaching reform. The problem solving approach supports education reform as a bot- tom-up process. “Bottom” means “class”, and “up” means “so- ciety” as a whole”. In addition, NCTM (2000) referred to the importance of problem solving as integration of all mathemati- cal learning by determining a main issue of teaching and learn- ing programs from the elementary level to grade 12 that stu- dents should be able to investigate and reflect on mathematical problem solving, which serves as a basic provision regarding metacognitive traits. The provision should begin to be used with students at the lowest school grade in mathematical prob- lem solving. In the research on mathematical problem solving, based on the fundamental concept of Flavell (1976: p. 232), the metacognitive aspect is significant for many researchers. Ac- cording to Flavell’s definition of metacognition, it can be con- cluded that “In any kind of cognitive transaction with the hu- man or non-human environment, a variety of information proc- essing activities may go on. Metacognition refers, among other things, to the active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes in relation to the cognitive objects or data on which they bear, usually in service of some concrete goal or objective.” There is increasing interest concerning the study on roles of metacognition in mathematical problem solving. However, little is known about the nature of elementary students’ use of meta- cognitive strategies, and how these strategies are applied when students solve problems. Goos and Galbraith (1996) conducted a study on the nature of using metacognitive strategies by two secondary students and studied how the students applied those strategies when they took part in problem solving. In Inpra- sitha’s study (2003) of Thai students’ metacognition, he found that when they read mathematical problems, they knew what were given in the questions, but they could solve problems only to a certain extent. As for metacognitive strategies, students conducted observation and investigation in advance of problem solving by developing plans, monitoring, and evaluating their own learning or thinking; this approach improved students’ efficiency in open-ended problem solving. These strategies were still used among students at low levels, although there were still some pairs of students who did not employ metacog- nitive strategies during open-ended problem solving. From review of literature regarding metacognitive strategies, the study of Pressley, Veenman et al. (2004) shows that to develop metacognition among student groups, teachers need to have tools to apply metacognition within classes, beneficial to those activities. In general, metacognitive learning and teaching is not only essential to each teacher but also in systematic school