Engaging students in inquiry is a key component in order to fulfill essential goals in science education. To achieve successful engagement in inquiry process, students need to feel competent and autonomous in spite of the cognitive and mental challenges the process entails. The study focuses on the problematizing mechanisms of scaffolds and highlights the centrality of metacognition in the inquiry process. The study’s primary goal was to examine how providing students involved in inquiry with individual, social, or a combination of both metacognitive scaffoldings affected their expressions of competence and autonomy. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we examined middle-school students’ expressions of competence and autonomy in an online asynchronous forum that accompanied a year-long socio-scientific inquiry process. The process included four research conditions which differed by the metacognitive scaffolding students received: only individual, only social, both individual and social, and no metacognitive scaffolds. Although no significance difference was observed in students’ expressions of competence in the initial phases of the inquiry among the research groups, students who received individual or social metacognitive scaffolding increased these expressions as they progressed through the process. Expressions of competence by students who received a combination of both types of support remained constant. In contrast, a significant decrease in students’ expressions of competence was observed in the control group. Regarding autonomy, students’ expressions of autonomy from all scaffolded conditions remained constant throughout the inquiry process, except for a significant decrease, experienced by students in the control group. The results are discussed through the lens of problematizing mechanism by which metacognitive scaffolding operate.

使学生参与探究是实现科学教育的基本目标的关键组成部分。为了成功地参与探究过程，尽管过程涉及认知和心理挑战，学生仍需要感到胜任和自主。该研究着重于问题化脚手架的机制，并突出了元认知在研究过程中的中心作用。这项研究的主要目的是检验向参与调查的学生提供个人，社会或两种元认知支架的组合如何影响他们的能力和自主性表达。使用定性和定量方法，我们在一个为期一年的社会科学探究过程中，在一个在线异步论坛中研究了中学生的能力和自主权表达。该过程包括四个研究条件，这些条件因所接收的元认知支架而不同：只有个人，只有社会的，既有个人的又是社会的，没有元认知支架。尽管在研究组之间的询问的初始阶段，学生的能力表达没有观察到显着差异，但是接受个人或社会元认知支架的学生随着过程的进行而增加了这些表达。接受了两种支持的学生的能力表达保持不变。相反，在对照组中，学生的能力表达显着下降。关于自主性，在整个询问过程中，学生在所有脚手架条件下的自主性表达都保持不变，但对照组的学生却表现出明显的降低。通过元认知支架运作的问题机制的角度来讨论结果。