Metacognitive awareness in relation to gender and teaching experience: a comparative study on teachers

Education is the process of moulding an individual to his full potential in cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains. Transformation of an individual from traditional learner to novice learner requires their own cognitive reflections. When learners are equipped with this knowledge, they will understand their own thinking and learning process and application of learning strategies, plan how to proceed with a learning task, monitor their own performance on an ongoing basis, find solutions to problems encountered, and evaluate themselves upon task completion (Zhang & Goh, 2006). Purposes of the present study were 1) to determine and compare the level of Metacognitive Awareness of teachers who are teaching in secondary and primary school levels and 2) to examine whether there exist any significant difference in metacognitive awareness of these teachers on the basis of gender and teaching experience. In accordance with this purpose, the Inventory of Metacognitive Awareness (Schraw & Dennison, 1994) was applied to 50 secondary level teachers (26 females and 24 males) and 50 primary school teachers (26 females and 24 male) of Kerala state. The results of the study shows that the majority of the secondary school teachers had an average level of awareness in planning, organizing and evaluating the various steps of the classroom process, whereas upper primary school teachers have high level awareness regarding the various stages of classroom activities. Furthermore, there appeared significant difference in the scores of metacognitive awareness according to gender for both secondary and primary teachers. But there existed no significant difference between the mean scores of secondary school teachers’ metacognitive awareness based on teaching experience but significant difference for primary school teachers.