Promoting preservice STEM education teachers’ metacognitive awareness: Professional development designed to improve teacher metacognitive awareness

Abstract

This quantitative portion of a convergent complementarity, mixed-methods, exploratory study describes the design and implementation of a 5-week preservice teacher professional development (PD) experience and the associated Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) measures before and after the experience. The PD experience was designed to explicitly address participants’ domain-general and domain-specific knowledge and regulation of cognition through a highly integrated academic and clinical preparation regimen centered on a cognitive coaching model. The study participants comprised preservice STEM education teachers (N= 11) enrolled in a dual teaching certification and Master’s in Education program. The findings showed an increase in participants’ regulation of cognition based on all utilized factor structures of metacognitive awareness, but not all factor structures indicated a change in participants’ knowledge of cognition over the study period.