ASSESSMENT OF TEACHERS' METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS. VALIDATION AND APPLICATION OF METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS, IMPLICATIONS FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The article presents methodological research in the field of
metacognition, centered on the pre-testing and validation of a
research instrument that will be applied in a cross-sectional
study on teacher needs analysis. The training needs analysis is a
part of the research of the doctoral dissertation "Development of
metacognitive skills of primary and pre-school teachers". Given
that in this research we intend to measure the level of
metacognitive awareness of teachers in relation to their
professional development and in order to approach the elements
of metacognition in a unified way, we considered it useful to
adapt two commonly used instruments for this purpose: the
metacognitive awareness inventory for teachers, after
Balcikanli, and the metacognitive awareness inventory for
adults, after Schraw and Dennison. These instruments were pretested
on a total of 195 primary and pre-school teachers. In this
article, we present the research background, the process and
results of the pretesting of the Adult Metacognitive Awareness
Inventory -MAI (Schraw and Dennison,1994), which was
adapted and developed according to the aims and context of the
doctoral research The variables of the methodological research
were defined and correlated according to the answers regarding:
a) significant differences between the factors influencing the
level of metacognitive awareness; b) obtaining positive and
significant correlations between the factors and the dimensions
of the MAI inventory. The obtained results were grouped in three
parts represented by: a) item descriptive statistics; b) results of
confirmatory factor analysis; c) descriptive analyses on
metacognition dimensions and elements of inferential intergroup
statistics. In this article, the results of the pretesting of the MAI
inventory by means of inferential statistics are presented in
detail. The statistical analyses confirm the validity of the adapted
instrument, according to the metacognitive awareness inventory
for adults - MAI (Schraw and Dennison, 1994), by its internal
consistency and its relevance in assessing the level of
metacognitive awareness of the subjects in the group of teachers
selected for the doctoral research.