METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS OF SCIENCE ORIENTED STUDENTS IN REPUBLIC OF SERBIA

Year 2015, Volume: 2 , 5 - 8, 30.04.2015

Dušanka ž. Obadovıć İvana Bogdanovıć Stanko Cvjetıćanın Milica Pavkov

Abstract

This paper presents an
analysis of science oriented students’ metacognitive awareness. Research sample
consists of about 200 students of both genders that have enrolled in science
oriented department in one of four Grammar schools in Novi Sad. Students
enrolling Grammar school in Serbia are mainly 15 years old girls and boys. For
the need of this research, the questionnaire (that included Metacognitive
Awareness Inventory - MAI) was constructed. According to the first framework
given by Flavell (1971), metacognitive awareness can be categorized into
awareness of: metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive regulation and
metacognitive experiences. Knowledge of cognition usually includes three
different kinds of metacognitive awareness: declarative knowledge, procedural
knowledge and conditional (strategic) knowledge. Regulation of cognition refers
to awareness of the need to use certain strategies, such as planning,
information management, monitoring, evaluation and debugging in process of thinking
and learning. The students, who conceive the experiments (scientific method) in
teaching physics helpful for their understanding of the physics contents, have
shown higher level of metacognitive awareness. The same could be concluded for
the students who are writing down in a notebook the performed experiments
(procedure, explanation, conclusions...) and the students who understand
experiments and their explanations. If metacognition is defined as the
knowledge and control over children’s own thinking and learning activities, it
is very obvious that metacognition have great impact on learning process. 

Keywords

physics, science, metacognition, metacognitive awareness

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