ASSESSMENT OF TEACHERS' METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS. VALIDATION AND APPLICATION OF METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS, IMPLICATIONS FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The article presents methodological research in the field of metacognition, centered on the pre-testing and validation of a research instrument that will be applied in a cross-sectional study on teacher needs analysis. The training needs analysis is a part of the research of the doctoral dissertation "Development of metacognitive skills of primary and pre-school teachers". Given that in this research we intend to measure the level of metacognitive awareness of teachers in relation to their professional development and in order to approach the elements of metacognition in a unified way, we considered it useful to adapt two commonly used instruments for this purpose: the metacognitive awareness inventory for teachers, after Balcikanli, and the metacognitive awareness inventory for adults, after Schraw and Dennison. These instruments were pretested on a total of 195 primary and pre-school teachers. In this article, we present the research background, the process and results of the pretesting of the Adult Metacognitive Awareness Inventory -MAI (Schraw and Dennison,1994), which was adapted and developed according to the aims and context of the doctoral research The variables of the methodological research were defined and correlated according to the answers regarding: a) significant differences between the factors influencing the level of metacognitive awareness; b) obtaining positive and significant correlations between the factors and the dimensions of the MAI inventory. The obtained results were grouped in three parts represented by: a) item descriptive statistics; b) results of confirmatory factor analysis; c) descriptive analyses on metacognition dimensions and elements of inferential intergroup statistics. In this article, the results of the pretesting of the MAI inventory by means of inferential statistics are presented in detail. The statistical analyses confirm the validity of the adapted instrument, according to the metacognitive awareness inventory for adults - MAI (Schraw and Dennison, 1994), by its internal consistency and its relevance in assessing the level of metacognitive awareness of the subjects in the group of teachers selected for the doctoral research.