The Role of Metacognitive Awareness and Motivation of Prospective Primary School Teachers in Predicting Their Academic Achievement in the 'Science and Technology Laboratory Applications'; Course

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the predictive effects of metacognitive awareness of prospective primary school teachers and their motivation to learn science subjects on their academic achievement in the ‘Science and Technology Laboratory Applications’ course. A total of 108 (72 females, 36 males) prospective primary school teachers participated in the study. The sample of the study consists of second-grade prospective primary school teachers attending the ‘Primary School Teaching’ department of a public university in the academic year of 2017-2018. The study was carried out with relational screening model, one of the descriptive research methods. As the data collection tools, metacognitive awareness scale, motivation scale for science learning, and the average grades of the prospective teachers from the science course were used. To determine the relationship between the prospective primary school teachers’ academic achievements in their science courses and their metacognitive awareness and motivation for science learning, the Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient was used. Besides, multiple regression analysis was used to determine the extent to which the sub-factors of metacognitive awareness and motivation of prospective teachers accounted for the variance in their academic achievement. The study concludes the importance of the sub-factors predicting academic achievement as follows: knowledge of cognition, the motivation for research, the motivation for participation, the motivation for collaborative work, and motivation for performance. Furthermore, it has been determined that all factors accounted for 37% of the variance on academic achievement.