METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS OF TEACHERS - MASTER DEGREE STUDENTS IN CURRICULUM MANAGEMENT

Background:
The concept of metacognition is little-known and there are several attempts for defining it, the first ones older than 30 years. Balcikanli (2011) consider that the most known definition is of Flavell (1976): metacognition is “one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive process and products or anything related to them”. Costa (1984, apud. Kingir & Aydemir, 2012) offers a more general interpretation: “our ability to know what we know and what we don’t know”. The same source mentions another definition of metacognition given by Flevell (1979): “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena”. Livingstone (1997) highlights the formal model of metacognitive monitoring proposed by Flavell (1979).

This model includes four categories of phenomena:
(a) metacognitive knowledge,
(b) metacognitive experiences,
(c) tasks or goals, and
(d) strategies or activities and their relationships.

Lai (2012) details the components and subcomponents of metacognition: a) the subcomponents of knowledge of cognition are declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and conditional knowledge. The subcomponents of regulation of cognition are planning, information management, monitoring, debugging, and evaluation.

Method and results:
Balcikanli (2011) propose a version of the MAI addressed to teachers: Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Teachers (MAIT). The items of MAIT include the subcomponents of metacognition and it offers the metacognitive awareness profile of the teacher.
This study describes an investigation in which 29 master students (Curricular Management master program) of Babes-Bolyai University have participated. Filling in the questionnaire with 24 items allowed respondents to reflect on those categories of knowledge and processes which are required by the use of metacognition as a teacher. The obtained results are on the level 4-5 of a 5 levels Lickert scale, which corresponds to a high level of teachers’ metacognitive awareness.

Discussion:
The MAIT questionnaire items refer to the teaching experience of the respondents. Also, the respondents are master students of a specialization which offers a course in the domain of metacognition and self-regulated learning. These explain the high level of metacognitive awareness in case of the majority of students.