Investigation of Primary School Teacher Candidates Metacognitive Awareness Level

Abstract

People are equipped with the ability to learn something new every moment in their educational life and daily life. In the learning process, a great number of processes are applied to get the expected behaviour. Cognitive processes are the main point of our learning process. Cognitive development starts from the birth. Learning occurs by adding new information on the previously learnt information. At this point, metacognitive process includes a person’s knowing his own actions, become aware of them, supervise them, think about them, draw conclusions and plan them. These skills also make learning process easier. It is highly important for our education system and students that the teachers have those skills, too. In that sense, primary school teacher candidates’ metacognitive awareness level has been analyzed in this study. In the study, scanning method has been used to describe the current situation. Our sample includes the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students who study at two Education Faculty in 2015-2016 academic year in Turkey. 370 teacher candidates participated in this study. As the data collection tool, Metacognition Awareness Inventory which was developed by Schraw and Dennison (1994) and adapted to Turkish by Akin, Abaci and Cetin (2007) has been used. SPSS16 program has been used for data analysis. As a result of the study, it was found that primary teacher candidates have high level of metacognitive awareness and the correlation among parameters has been analyzed with Metacognition Awareness Inventory.