EXPLORING THE ONTOLOGICAL BOUNDARY OF METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS OF PRE-SERVICE EDUCATORS

Abstract

The pre-service educator preparation period is crucial in developing the competencies necessary for effective educators who succeed in the classroom. Consequently, it becomes imperative for pre-service educators to develop their awareness of self-regulatory and metacognitive skills to become effective in the classroom. Therefore, the process of developing pre-service educators' metacognitive awareness is important if we are to produce self-directed learners with well-developed cognitive skills. However, the designing and development of Bachelor of Education programmes that enhances teaching with metacognition is a neglected area in higher education institutions. The concept of Ontology is applied in this presentation because it constitutes an explicit specification of a conceptualization of the levels of interpretation of metacognitive awareness. This presentation reports on part of a larger quantitative study on the relationship between metacognitive awareness, teaching perspectives, and sense of efficacy of pre-service educators. On the theoretical component, the presentation aims to explore a framework for analysing the level of pre-service educators' metacognitive awareness, building on the self-directed learning theory and its application in the context of pre-service educators. A sample of 683 pre-service educators completed the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Teachers. To present and describe data, mean scores, standard deviations, Cohen's effect size for interpretation of results, and Spearman's correlation coefficients to determine correlations between concepts using multiple regression analysis were calculated, this was done to determine the nature of the relationship between the constructs (variables) of metacognitive knowledge and the effect of specified contextual components such as gender, Language of instruction, Mode of delivery Programme enrolled for and Area of specialisation as well as Campus of the respondents in relation to metacognitive awareness. There are two levels of interpretation of the findings presented here: (i) the manifested component of metacognitive awareness, and (ii) the contextual components of gender, language of instruction, programme enrolled for, area of specialisation, mode of delivery, and campus. This study is of particular interest to tertiary institutions, who are charged with the task of developing educators who can influence student achievement in a positive way.