An investigation of teacher candidates’ metacognitive skills according to their year of study at Canakkale

The aim of the present study was to investigate the differences in teacher candidates’ metacognitive skills analyzed according to the year of study in their undergraduate program they were in. The research methodology in the study was survey. Among survey types, the cross-sectional design was used. The sample of the study included a total of 1072 students (322 male and 750 female) who studied in the Elementary Education, Science Education, and Preschool Teaching Divisions at the Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Faculty of Education, Department of Primary School Education during the spring semester of 2012 to 2013. Data was collected using the “Metacognitive Skills Inventory for Adults”, which was developed by Schraw & Denisson (1994) and adapted into Turkish by Ozcan (2007). It was found that the metacognitive skill scores of teacher candidates who were studying in their third and fourth years were higher than those who attended first year and second year.


INTRODUCTION
The constructivist learning approach requires developing students' metacognitive skills via courses.In Turkey, elementary education programs were developed in accordance with the constructivist approach in the academic year of 2004 to 2005.Therefore, it is expected that teacher candidates, who will practice constructivist applications in the classroom setting, have sufficient levels of metacognitive skills.The concept of metacognition was first established at the beginning of the 20th century by psychologists such as William James, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey (Flavell and Quirk, 2006).Theory and research in the field of metacognition were composed of studies on metacognitive development, which were conducted in the early 1970's.This body of research, which was based on a broad theoretical framework, included studies conducted by Brown et al. (1983), Flavell et al. (2002), Kuhn (1999), Moshman (1998), and Schneider and Bjorklund, (1998).Most of the developmental studies, which were included in the category of metacognition, examined children's metacognitions and investigated the factors affecting memory performance and the level of knowledge, focusing on the use of memory strategies in particular (Flavell, 2000;Flavell, 2004).Metacognitive theories constitute a subset of mental development theories which involve all of the mental development theories; however, they are not limited to the theories of cognition.Metacognitive theories are mental development theories that focus on the cognitive dimensions of the mind (Schraw and Moshman, 1995).

LITERATURE REVIEW
The term metacognition refers to the awareness about one's own mental processes, the regulation and evaluation of one's own skills, and monitoring one's own thoughts (Bonds and Bonds, 1992).Generally identified as a deliberate mental activity and consciousness effectiveness (Martinez, 2006), it is defined as knowledge about cognition or a cognitive activity that regards itself as its own object and regulates a certain dimension of a cognitive activity (Flavell, 1985;Flavell et al., 2002;Flavell and Quirk, 2006).
It includes knowledge about the wise nature of humans, the nature of different cognitive tasks, and possible strategies which can be used for the solution of different tasks.In addition, it involves executive skills which enable the monitoring and regulation of one's own cognitive activities.Metacognition is an individual knowing not only something he or she did or didn't do, but also what the individual does in order to increase learning and solve situations of comprehension failure (Armbruster et al., 1983).Most of the studies on metacognition investigated children's metacognition, specifically their level of knowledge and use of memory strategies; however, the majority of such studies also examined children's metacognitions regarding language and communication, perception and attention, comprehension and problem solving (Flavell, 1999).
The development of metacognitive skills in students focuses more on task related mental activities (Flavell, 2000).According to Martinez (2006) metacognition is important for learners of all ages and, as pointed out by Larkin (2010), it has a positive effect on learning.Researchers have found that metacognitive skills play important roles in fields such as verbal communication, verbal persuasion, written understanding, written language acquisition, attention, memory, problem solving, self-control and self-education (Flavell, 1979).Metacognition is, therefore, necessary for successful learning (Schraw, 1998).Metacognition is generally divided into two components, namely the regulation of cognition and the knowledge of cognition (Schraw, 2009;Schraw, Olafson et al., 2012;Schreiber, 2005;Bruning et al., 1999).While the knowledge of cognition consists of conditional information, procedural knowledge, and explanatory information, the regulation of cognition consists of monitoring and planning (Schreiber, 2005).Metacognitive knowledge includes remembering, the pros and cons of the variables and conditions affecting different coding methods and memory performance, and one's beliefs on their own memory (Koriat, 2004).Metacognitive knowledge is defined as knowledge taken into memory regarding the goals and strategies of a person in their effort to continue cognitive efforts, which are declared information (Desoete and Veenman, 2006).
Metacognitive knowledge forms the basis of the belief system on which style of interactions, actions, and factors Çetin 11 would affect the results of cognitive effort, such as studying (Flavell, 1979).Metacognitive knowledge to goal related strategies and successful problem solving (Schraw, 1998).How metacognitive knowledge is used by students to make their own learning possible is important.The evaluation of metacognitive knowledge by teachers would be done more by informal methods.
Teachers should evaluate the metacognitive knowledge of students deeply, quickly, and honestly in order to realize the general level of metacognitive knowledge in the classroom (Pintrich, 2002).Metacognitive knowledge is, in principle, not basically different from other information stored in long term memory (Flavell, 1979).
Researchers have found a relationship between the school performances of students and metacognitive information (Schneider, 2010).Increasing age, memory performance, and metacognitive knowledge were also found to be related (Schneider and Lockl, 2004).
As mentioned above, metacognitive knowledge includes declarative, procedural and conditional information.Declarative knowledge refers to knowledge about oneself as a learner and about what factors can influence one's performance.Examples include taking notes, summarizing main topics, using memory improvement methods, and periodically self-testing (Bruning et al., 1999).Declarative knowledge is knowledge on distinctive learning characteristics that affect cognitive processes, which is knowledge one may have on their own abilities (McCormick, 2003).Procedural information reflects abilities and skills (Martin and Stapel, 1998).Conditional knowledge refers to knowing when and why to use declarative and procedural knowledge.This in turn allows the strategies to become more effective.Planning, categorizing strategies for problem solving, skills, and compensation regarding specific information, all include the evaluation of writing exercises (Vanderswalmen et al., 2010).
The regulation of cognition consists of three structures which are planning, regulation and evaluation.Planning includes separating resources and the selection of appropriate strategies.Planning also often involves setting activities related to the background information as goals.Regulation includes the self-testing skills required for controlling learning, as well as monitoring.Evaluation includes an individual's evaluation of the product information obtained as a result of his regulation of the learning process.Examples include re-evaluating one's options, and revising guesses (Bruning et al.,1999).Problem solving and critical thinking strategies make it possible for students to regulate their own learning through metacognitive skills.Examples include solving tests and evaluating the answers.Learning together helps with metacognitive monitoring and evaluation, and increases the use of cognitive strategies (Schraw, 2006).Metacognitive skills form the basis of lifelong learning (Flavell and Quirk, 2006).Metacognition is general, not field specific (Schraw, 1998).
Metacognition is used to define strategy selection and the monitoring of cognitive performance, belief, cognition on cognition, and the use of mind theories.Metacognition is vital in deciding which information is important and when resources should be expanded.The role of metacognition in general cognition is to provide a feedback loop in the implementation of strategies (Diana and Reder, 2004).Performing the mental activities which are related to education can help children become aware of their knowledge and the mental existence of others as well as themselves (Flavell et al., 1995).Metacognitive skills play important roles in reading and other fields of school learning.Metacognitive skills undergo important developments during youth and mid childhood (Flavell, 1985).Determining the level of metacognitive skill that teacher candidates possess can contribute to the determination of topics they find hard to learn during undergraduate study.The level of metacognitive skill a teacher candidate has affects his/her academic success during undergraduate education.Having an idea about one's self learning process would increase performance during undergraduate study.If a teacher candidate knows which strategy and methods work effectively for his/her self-learning process, his/her academic success would increase.Teacher candidates with high metacognitive skills could both perform in their chosen profession successfully and realize self-learning in their personal life, leading to increased confidence in teaching and learning.
Teacher candidates should develop metacognitive skills during undergraduate study, and they should have the necessary qualifications for teaching metacognitive skills.In order to offer students to develop metacognitive skills in formal education, teacher candidates should have the desired level of metacognitive proficiency.If the teacher candidate knows how he/she learned, he/she can then have a better idea on how to teach it.If teacher candidates know their own metacognitive skills, they can choose which strategy to use when learning something new.
In this context, metacognitive skills contribute to lifelong learning.When the learner has knowledge of his own learning process and controls it, high quality learning can be achieved.Teachers should have information on their own learning processes, become good role models to the learners, and undertake a role in teaching how to learn.A teacher with high metacognitive skills would use strategies, methods, and techniques appropriate for fostering metacognitive skills in the classroom environment.The courses teacher candidates take during undergraduate study are expected to increase their metacognitive skills.During this four-year course of study, the metacognitive skills of teacher candidates should positively develop.
Teacher candidates are expected to gain these metacognitive skills in a certain process and speed starting from their freshman year.The number of studies evaluating whether the metacognitive skill levels of teacher candidate change according to their year of undergraduate study is limited.This study is expected to fill the gap which is the lack of the studies on metacognitive skills of students.

Purpose
In this study, whether the metacognitive skill level scores of teacher candidates' change according to their year of undergraduate study was evaluated.The hypothesis of this study is this: Is there any difference between the students whose classes are different?

METHODOLOGY
In this study, survey method was used in order to determine metacognitive skills of teacher candidates according to their year of study (Gay et al., 2009;Fraenkel and Wallen, 2006;Creswell, 2008).

Participants
The sample of the study included a total of 1072 students (322 male and 750 female) who studied at the Primary School Education, Science Education, and Preschool Education programs at the Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University.Information on the sample group is presented in Table 1.

INSTRUMENTS Metacognitive skills inventory for adults
In order to measure the metacognitive skill levels of teacher candidates, the "Metacognitive Skills Inventory for Adults", which was developed by Schraw and Dennison (1994), and translated into Turkish (Schraw and Dennison, 1994;Özcan, 2007).The inventory consists of 52 questions and two sub scales, which are awareness of cognitive characteristics (17 questions) and regulation of cognitive skills (35 questions).In the reliability study of the inventory, the Cronbach Alpha coefficient was found to be .95. internal consistency coefficient, which was calculated for testing the inventory's total reliability.The Spearman Brown and Gutmann coefficients pertaining to the inventory were equal (Özcan, 2007).In addition to the survey questions, two were added to collect information about gender and study.

Data analysis
In the study, data was analysed after descriptive statistics computing was done for the independent variables.The one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted in order to test the differences between year of study; whereas the least significant difference technique (LSD) which compute the smallest significant difference between two means, was used for determining betweengroup differences.

FINDINGS
In this section, findings regarding the teacher candidates' metacognitive skill scores by year of study are presented.
The analysis of the variance (one-way ANOVA) that related to metacognitive skills of the students who are in different classes, was presented.As seen in Table 2, the highest score for the "regulation of cognitive skills" belongs to the third-year students and the lowest to the second-year students.The highest score for the "awareness of cognitive properties" belongs to the fourthyear students and the lowest to the second-year students.In total, the highest score for the "metacognitive skills" belongs to third-year students and the lowest to the second-year students at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University.
In this section, findings regarding the teacher candidates' metacognitive skill scores by year of study are presented.Is there any difference between the teacher candidates whose classes are different?As seen in Table 3, the metacognitive skill scores of teacher candidates showed significant differences by year of study.These differences were observed in the regulation of cognitive

DISCUSSION
The purpose of this study was to determine the differences in teacher candidates' metacognitive skills according to their year of study.When we examined the differences in metacognitive skill scores by year of study, we observed that the differences originated from the teacher candidates who attend third year and fourth year were in the regulation of cognitive skills and awareness of cognitive characteristics sub scales and the total scale.According to this finding, it can be said that the metacognitive skill scores of teacher candidates who attend third year and fourth year are higher than those who attend first year and second year.It can be concluded that the Primary School Education, Science Education, and Preschool Education bachelor degree programs contribute to the enhancement of metacognitive skills in teacher candidates.The results of other studies are similar to ours.Tüysüz et al. (2008) found that mean metacognitive scores of the primary school education students who were in their second, third and fourth years were higher than of those who were in their first year.Alcı and Yuksel (2012) determined that the differences in metacognitive awareness scores of English teacher candidates originated from students who were in their second year and fourth year.Sezgin et al. (2009) reported that there were significant differences in metacognitive skill scores of primary school education students according to the year they were in the undergraduate course.The authors found that the scores of second-year, third-year, and fourth-year students who attended fourth year, third year and second year were higher than of those who attended first year.Contrary to our results, Aydın and Coşkun (2011) could not find a significant relationship between metacognitive skill levels of geography teacher candidates and class in school.Baykara (2011), could not find significant differences in metacognitive learning strategies of English teacher candidates according to their class in school.

CONCLUSION
It was presumed that the courses taken by teacher candidates during the third and fourth years of education increased their metacognitive skill levels.Teacher candidates take main courses (Introduction to Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Ataturk's Principles and the History of Revolution, etc.) and pedagogical courses (Introduction to Teaching, Educational Psychology, Educational Sociology, Teaching Methods, etc.) in their first and second year; whereas they take more specific courses in their own area of interest during the third and fourth years.In the first and second years of education, teacher candidates take general and pedagogical courses, they are not active at all in means of teaching and they take courses in classroom settings where the teacher candidate is a passive listener.In addition, during the third and fourth years, instructors confer more responsibility to teacher candidates.Teacher candidates prepare projects, applied research, and seminars and give lectures.We think that the difference between third and fourth-year students and other years can be explained by the facts mentioned above.We think that our study findings would be beneficial for researchers who study in the field of teacher training.In addition, our study results can be utilized by managers and academicians who work at faculties of education and executives at the Ministry of Education in order to increase the quality of education provided for teacher candidates.

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics pertaining to the sample distribution.

Table 2 .
Differences in the metacognitive skill scores of teacher candidates according to year of study (descriptive statistics).
The inventory has Likert type responses in 5 categories (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently and always).There are no reversely worded questions in the inventory.The reliability of measurements taken at different times is approximately 99%.The Cronbach Alpha value of the Metacognitive Skills Inventory for Adults (.9384) was the highest

Table 3 .
Present the results of one-way ANOVA and LSD test.