Teachers\u27 metacognitive awareness and metacognitive instructional practice: A mixed method study in Egypt

Metacognition plays a vital role in 21st entury learning as it is found to be avery important predictor of learning. Research shows that metacognition can be taught and promoted inside the classroom. However, a gap was found between theory and practice where instructional practices that are actually done by teachers to promote metacognition are scarce. Litereture suggests that developing teachers\u27 metacognitve skills is a prerequisite for promoting metacognition inside the classroom. In addition, research investigating teachers\u27 metacognition is scarce with methodological concerns about the exisiting studies since they use self report for data collection that are not found to be ecologically valid compared to online measures like observations with several calls for mixed methods to give a holisitic view about teachers metacognition. The current study is a mixed method study that collects data through a quantitative followed by a qualitative method. For the quantitative study, 394 teachers from 31 schools from different socioeconomic levels in Cairo answered the Arabic adapted version of the Metacognitive Awareness inventory (MAI). Statisitcal analysis shows high level of metacognitve awareness by Egyptian teachers. In addition, t test an ANOVA shows no significant differences inteachers metacognitive awareness based on gender, subjects taught, type of schools or grade level. The only signifcant difference found was in experience where teachers with 6 to 15 years of experience show signifcantly higher metacognitive awareness compared to teachers of 16 or more years of experience while there was no siginificant difference between novice teachers (0-5 years of experience) and teachers with 6 to 15 years of experience. For the qualitative study, four female teachers were interviewed and observed through two cycles of pre-observation interview, class observations and post observation interview and several themes emerged of how teachers think and use metacognitive instructional practices to adapt their instructions