The level of metacognitive awareness of pre-service mathematics teachers at a higher education institutions

[摘要] English: There are ongoing concerns about educational institutions not empowering learners with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for school achievement, lifelong learning, and the workplace of the new millennium. In particular, South African learners have performed poorly in recent national and international assessments of mathematical proficiency. As a result, the Department of Basic Education has asserted the importance of enhancing the quality of Mathematics teaching and learning. Enhancing the ability to teach Mathematics has the potential to improve educational outcomes, as well as increase future employment and higher education opportunities for young South Africans.The poor Mathematics results point to the need to enhance, among other things, learners' metacognitive awareness. Metacognitive awareness entails the knowledge and regulation of one's cognitive processes. Enhancing metacognition could not only support learners in solving mathematical problems, and so improve mathematical achievement, but could also enhance productive and lifelong learning in learners. Fostering metacognitive awareness within Mathematics learners involves first fostering metacognitive awareness in Mathematics teachers, who are responsible for facilitating quality Mathematics teaching and learning. However, research suggests that teachers generally do not teach or model metacognitive awareness to their learners, or display metacognitive adaptive competence in their own teaching practice.The purpose of the study was to determine the level of metacognitive awareness of Mathematics pre-service teachers at a Higher Education Institution. Framed within a post-positivist/interpretivist paradigm, a mainly quantitative research approach with a minor qualitative enquiry informed the study. The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) was distributed to fourth-year Mathematics pre-service teachers at a South African Higher Education Institution in order to determine their metacognitive awareness regarding Knowledge of cognition (comprising of Declarative knowledge, Procedural knowledge, and Conditional knowledge) and Regulation of cognition (comprising of Planning, Information management, Monitoring, Debugging, and Evaluation).To enrich the findings of the quantitative analysis, the qualitative data generated from a think-aloud problem-solving session-where the pre-service teachers recorded their thought processes whilst solving a problem-was analysed to determine the extent to which their reported metacognitive awareness translated into successfully solving a Mathematics problem. In the quantitative findings on the MAI, the pre-service teachers reported a moderately high level of metacognitive awareness; in addition, they reported a higher level of metacognitive knowledge (Knowledge of cognition) than of metacognitive skills (Regulation of cognition). Findings from the think-aloud problem-solving session, meanwhile, point to an inadequate level of metacognitive awareness, indicating a gap between what the pre-service teachers report to do in the learning and problem solving of Mathematics and what they can actually do in a problem-solving context. There is historical precedent for this gap, as noted in the scholarship.The close of the study highlights the need to enhance the metacognitive awareness and reflective practice of these Mathematics pre-service teachers by enhancing their metacognitive skills-Monitoring, Debugging, and Evaluation-and enhancing their problem-solving skills. It is further recommended that reflective problem-solving opportunities built around complex, novel problems be incorporated into Mathematics modules in teacher training, to facilitate prolonged and deliberate reflection. More broadly, it recommends that metacognitive reflective and problem-solving opportunities are provided for novice and underqualified teachers.Such opportunities will aid prospective and current Mathematics teachers to become mathematically proficient and metacognitively aware themselves, to deal with novel scenarios in Mathematics and their teaching practice and to translate this metacognitive adaptive competence for their learners.

[发布机构] University of the Free State