Metacognitive Awareness of Teacher Candidates

AbstractIn recent years, the terms “metacognition” and “metacognitive skills” have been drawing considerable attention in educational environments for their authenticity in terms of considering student's learning process, actual performance and potentials. One of the major difficulties on the field of metacognition has been to develop and put into practice valid surveys or inventories to measure metacognitive skills. Accordingly, this research aimed to determine the level of metacognitive awareness gained by the teacher candidates studying different subject areas. The study was carried out on various departments of a faculty of education. In the plot phase, 30-item-scale was applied to 200 students and Cronbach's alpha was 0.71. In the main phase, 92 students took part and the final version of MAS (Metacognitive Awareness Scale) was used with 24 items under 3 dimensions. Cronbach's alpha was 0.71. With regard to MAS total scores, no difference was found according to gender, high school type graduated, type of education whether it was day or evening and grade point averages. Results indicate that MAS scale yields profound information about student's self, level of metacognitive strategies usage and evaluation of their performance as well as effectiveness of strategies they use. This study also illustrates the need of training students to use metacognitive strategies in the learning environments