Profiling pre-service teachers' awareness and regulation of their own thinking: Evidence from an Asian country

Abstract

This study aims to examine pre‐service teachers’ knowledge and regulation of cognition. The authors administered Schraw and Dennison’s Metacognitive Awareness Inventory to 254 pre‐service teachers in Singapore. The results showed no significant difference by educational level on all subscales except for evaluation, which is a subscale of regulation of knowledge. The authors also found no significant mean differences by gender. On the other hand, the results indicate that the mean scores for all subscales were significantly different by teaching experience, except for monitoring (which is a subscale of regulation of knowledge) and procedural knowledge (which is a subscale of knowledge of cognition). The implications of these results are discussed and the authors propose that teacher educators should distinguish pre‐service teachers who have substantial teaching experience prior to their enrollment to teacher training college and those without any prior experience. The experienced pre‐service teachers could help promote their counterparts’ metacognition by sharing their teaching experiences.