Metacognitive Strategies and Academic Achievement in Social Studies among Grade 4 Pupils

This study aimed to find relationship of pupils’ metacognitive strategies and academic achievement in Social Studies among Grade 4 pupils. Specifically, it sought to describe the academic achievement of Grade 4 pupils in Social Studies; determine the level of pupils’ metacognitive strategies in learning Social Studies in terms of declarative, procedural, and conditional strategies; and find out the significant relationship between the pupils’ academic achievement and their metacognitive strategies in learning Social Studies. A total of 207 pupils were drawn from seven (7) elementary schools in District III in the Division of Valencia City. To gather relevant information needed for the study, the researcher adopted the questionnaire developed by Schraw & Dennison (2004). The questionnaire is a standardized questionnaire, categorized into three areas that assessed pupils’ declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge. Student achievement was the reported grade of the pupils as cumulative scores in four (4) grading periods. Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, weighted mean and standard deviation and Pearson product-moment correlation were employed to treat the data. Results indicated that pupils’ academic achievement in Social Studies was satisfactory where 80% of them belong to middle grading range. The level of metacognitive awareness in terms of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge was high. The metacognitive awareness of pupils is not significantly related to their academic achievement. This further indicated that pupils’ awareness on their metacognitive strategies has nothing to do with their academic success in Social Studies because pupils had not fully developed their metacognitive strategies yet in learning the subject. It is worth saying that teachers have to introduce activities that would tap pupils’ metacognitive awareness, thus, this leads to the attainment of better achievement not only in Social Studies subject, but in all academic areas.