<p>This study was conducted to examine the primary theoretical relation between metacognition andmindfulness. 98 university students participated, the possible influence of their age and number ofeducation years on the concepts were also examined. A short version of the MetacognitiveAwareness Inventory along with the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale were employed to measure theconcepts. The results indicated that awareness, a central component of mindfulness wassignificantly related to metacognition. The results suggest that the concepts to some extent areinterrelated. Comparisons were made between students above, and below the median of age (22),and education years (1.5); no significant differences in metacognition or mindfulness were found.Neither were age and education years together significantly associated with the concepts.</p>

This study was conducted to examine the primary theoretical relation between metacognition andmindfulness. 98 university students participated, the possible influence of their age and number ofeducation years on the concepts were also examined. A short version of the MetacognitiveAwareness Inventory along with the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale were employed to measure theconcepts. The results indicated that awareness, a central component of mindfulness wassignificantly related to metacognition. The results suggest that the concepts to some extent areinterrelated. Comparisons were made between students above, and below the median of age (22),and education years (1.5); no significant differences in metacognition or mindfulness were found.Neither were age and education years together significantly associated with the concepts.

In order for students to become good self-directed learners, an awareness of one’s own learning process and studying strategies is essential. The aim of this paper is to describe a project –and the results of it - where a modified model of a problem-based learning (PBL) tutorial is used, a project launched to develop students’ metacognitive awareness and improve the quality of their tutorials. Dental hygiene students and their tutors at the faculty of Odontology, Malmö University participated in the project which meant that the students worked independently during the first PBL-session with the tutor only paying a few short visits to the group. At these visits, the students presented their problems, hypotheses and objectives with the purpose to create an opportunity of primarily reviewing and reflecting but also getting feed-back from the tutor. The tutor was present throughout the second PBL-session. This model was alternated with and compared to the traditional “Malmö model” in which the tutor participates throughout both PBL-sessions. The project was evaluated through interviews. A Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) was filled in before and after the project. Results for the MAI show a significant increase in metacognitive awareness. In the interviews, students state that they participated in the PBL-session to a greater extent and had more spontaneous discussions without the tutor, but also that they felt a lack of security and sometimes interrupted by the visits from the tutor.

The promise of increased student achievement through educational reform is delivered still-born if teachers do not know how to implement complex instructional practices and sophisticated analysis of student performance. Metacognitive awareness is crucial to the adoption and application of proven educational initiatives. Teachers who successfully implement criterion-referenced assessment instruction, scoring rubrics, transfer to their students the metacognitive knowledge and skills of how to learn. This study is predicated on the research assumptions that metacognition and its attendant skills are critical to the successful implementation of scoring rubrics. A researcher-developed instrument, the Scoring Rubrics Inventory (SRI) and the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) were distributed to core-subject teachers from three large public schools in Southwest Louisiana. From a population of sixty-eight (N=68) voluntary participants, eighteen teacher-participants self-reported as high implementers of scoring rubrics, thirty-nine as mid-level implementers and eleven as low-level implementers. From this population, twelve subjects were randomly selected (four high, four mid-level, and four lowlevel implementers) by an outside rater for double-blind observations and interviews. Pearson Product Moment correlations of the SRI and the MAI revealed five significant pairings using an alpha level of .05. The statistical results, coupled with the observation and interview findings from the sample-subjects established the consistency and stability of the Scoring Rubrics Inventory. Further, the totality of the results reported here support the research hypothesis of the study: H1: There is a significant correlation between the metacognitive awareness of secondary school core-subject teachers and the successful implementation of scoring rubrics. The results of the study indicated that secondary school core-subject teachers who successfully implement scoring rubrics possess a metacognitive awareness that transcends professional development training. The findings also suggested that teacher-participants who do not implement scoring rubrics either cannot or lack commitment to the innovation. Implications for teacher educators and school leaders indicated the need to: identify those persons who require additional professional development training; include operational strategies and modeling of successful implementation during training; and maintain a consistent training program in scoring rubrics. Recommendations for future research were offered.

Reading strategies are consciously controlled actions learners execute in order to aid comprehension. The effectiveness of strategies is increased with metacognitive awareness. Researchers have created instruments to raise metacognitive awareness targeted for native and highly proficient L2 readers. This article outlines the creation of a new survey, the Contextualized Inventory of Metacognitive Awareness for novice to low-intermediate L2 readers. Unlike other instruments, this survey contextualizes pre-, during-, and post-reading strategy deployment with the use of simplified, narrative reading passages. The survey was piloted at an Intensive English Program with 88 subjects. The overall readability of the survey had a Lexile score of 350L and a Coh-Metrix score of 35. The initial reliability of the survey was .69. Pedagogical uses and academic implications of the new survey are discussed.

The aims of the present study were to investigate the relationship among preservice science teachers&rsquo / informal reasoning regarding nuclear power plant construction, epistemological beliefs and metacognitive awareness. Throughout 2010-2011 fall and spring semesters, a total of 674 pre-service science teachers participated in the study. Data were collected through Schommer&rsquo / s Epistemological Questionnaire, Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, and Open-ended Questionnaire Assessing Informal Reasoning regarding Nuclear Power Usage. MANOVA, correlational analysis, and stepwise multiple regression analyses were conducted. The analyses revealed that the differences between pre-service science teachers&rsquo / epistemological beliefs within the two decision making groups were not statistically significant. Besides, results of the bivariate correlation revealed that there were statistically significant correlation between pre-service science teachers&rsquo / total argument construction and all the dimensions of SEQ except omniscient authority. Also, there was a significant correlation between pre-service science teachers&rsquo / certain knowledge dimension of SEQ and their counterargument construction. Moreover, the differences between pre-service science teachers&rsquo / metacognitive awareness within the two decision making groups were not statistically significant. Results of the bivariate correlation revealed that there was a significant correlation between preservice science teachers&rsquo / metacognitive awareness and informal reasoning outcomes. Finally, stepwise multiple regression analyses revealed that pre-service science teachers&rsquo / information management strategy was the only significant predictor for their rebuttal construction. Declarative knowledge was the best predictor of preservice science teachers&rsquo / counterargument construction while the second best predictor was certain knowledge for their counterargument construction. Finally declarative knowledge was the only significant predictor for the amount of preservice science teachers&rsquo / reasoning modes.

Multiple-choice (MCQs) and short-answer questions (SAQs) are the most common test formats for assessing English reading proficiency. While the former provides test-takers with prescribed options, the latter requires short written responses. Test developers favor MCQs over SAQs for the following reasons: less time required for rating, high rater agreement, and wide content coverage. This mixed methods dissertation investigated the impacts of test format on reading performance, metacognitive awareness, test-completion processes, and task perceptions. Participants were eighty English as a second language (ESL) learners from a Midwestern community college. They were first divided into two groups of approximately equivalent reading proficiencies and then completed MCQ and SAQ English reading tests in different orders. After completing each format, participants filled out a survey about demographic information, strategy use, and perceptions of test formats. They also completed a 5-point Likert-scale survey to assess their degree of metacognitive awareness. At the end, sixteen participants were randomly chosen to engage in retrospective interviews focusing on their strategy use and task perceptions. This study employed a mixed methods approach in which quantitative and qualitative strands converged to draw an overall meta-inference. For the quantitative strand, descriptive statistics, paired sample t-tests, item analyses, two-way ANOVAs, and correlation analyses were conducted to investigate 1) the differences between MCQ and SAQ test performance and 2) the relationship between test performance and metacognitive awareness. For the qualitative strand, test-takers’ MCQ and SAQ test completion processes and task perceptions were explored using coded interview and survey responses related to strategy use and perceptions of test formats. Results showed that participants performed differently on MCQ and SAQ reading tests, even though both tests were highly correlated. The paired sample t-tests revealed that participants’ English reading and writing proficiencies might account for the MCQ and SAQ performance disparity. Moreover, there was no positive relationship between reading test performance and the degree of metacognitive awareness generated by the frequency of strategy use. Correlation analyses suggested whether a higher or lower English reading proficiency of the participants was more important than strategy use. Although the frequency of strategy use did not benefit test performance, strategies implemented for MCQ and SAQ tests were found to generate interactive processes allowing participants to gain deeper understanding of the source texts. Furthermore, participants’ perceptions toward MCQs, SAQs, and a combination of both revealed positive and negative influences among test format, reading comprehension, and language learning. Therefore, participants’ preferences of test format should be considered when measuring their English reading proficiency. This study has pedagogical implications on the use of various test formats in L2 reading classrooms.

The primary task of learning to program in introductory computer science courses (CS1) cognitively overloads novices and must be better supported. Several recent studies have attempted to address this problem by understanding the role of metacognitive awareness in novices learning programming. These studies have focused on teaching metacognitive awareness to students by helping them understand the six stages of learning so students can know where they are in the problem-solving process, but these approaches are not scalable. One way to address scalability is to implement features in an automated assessment tool (AAT) that build metacognitive awareness in novice programmers. Currently, AATs that provide feedback messages to students can be said to implement the fifth and sixth learning stages integral to metacognitive awareness: implement solution (compilation) and evaluate implemented solution (test cases). The computer science education (CSed) community is actively engaged in research on the efficacy of compile error messages (CEMs) and how best to enhance them to maximize student learning and it is currently heavily disputed whether or not enhanced compile error messages (ECEMs) in AATs actually improve student learning. The discussion on the effectiveness of ECEMs in AATs remains focused on only one learning stage critical to metacognitive awareness in novices: implement solution. This research carries out an ethnomethodologically-informed study of CS1 students via think-aloud studies and interviews in order to propose a framework for designing an AAT that builds metacognitive awareness by supporting novices through all six stages of learning. The results of this study provide two important contributions. The first is the confirmation that ECEMs that are designed from a human-factors approach are more helpful for students than standard compiler error messages. The second important contribution is that the results from the observations and post-assessment interviews revealed the difficulties novice programmers often face to developing metacognitive awareness when using an AAT. Understanding these barriers revealed concrete ways to help novice programmers through all six stages of the problem-solving process. This was presented above as a framework of features, which when implemented properly, provides a scalable way to implicitly produce metacognitive awareness in novice programmers.

This study investigates reading comprehension strategies amongst 298 Swedish ESL students in upper-secondary school, possible relationships between high motivation to learn and high strategy use, and whether more experienced readers tend to use reading strategies more frequently than lesser experienced readers. Data was collected through online surveys, and the findings were analysed using quantitative analysis. The results of the study showed that experienced readers tend to use reading strategies more often than less experienced readers, but that the most employed strategies amongst students seem to be naturally occurring rather than metacognitive and self-regulated ones, indicating that the participating Swedish upper-secondary students lack sufficient knowledge of other reading strategies. The data regarding the possible relationships between high levels of motivation and a more varied use of reading strategies do not indicate a strong correlation. One possible conclusion of the study is that even if students seem to perceive themselves as strategy users, the strategies deemed most important by researchers still end up amongst the least used strategies, indicating that students still need to receive more explicit training in the use and functions of such strategies.

Metacognitive awareness plays an important role in students’ learning as well as in teaching and tutoring. The goal of this thesis research is to investigate the relationship between academic tutors’ metacognitive awareness, their student athlete tutees metacognitive awareness and academic performance (by cumulative GPA). Metacognitive awareness in tutors may have a significant influence on tutoring methods and students’ success. The population of tutors and students in the study is represented by 40 pairs of academic tutors and athlete students at one southern U.S. university. Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) was utilized and adapted for this study. Simple regression analysis results revealed that metacognitive awareness in students can predict their academic performance. Yet, tutors’ metacognitive awareness did not predict students’ metacognitive awareness and their cumulative GPA scores. Additional research with larger samples and via alternative methods as well as implications about potential of tutors’ metacognitive strategies for learners are discussed.