The Impacts of Metacognitive Awareness on Academic Performance of Secondary School Students in Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

This research study delved into the construct of metacognitive awareness among students and teachers in teaching and learning, and how this has influenced educational achievement amongst senior secondary learners in the county under investigation. Metacognition is the ability of learners to actively think about how effectively or otherwise they are learning The targets for the research were; (a) To find out the extent to which students incorporate metacognition in their studies, (b) To investigate the degree to which tutors foster metacognitive instruction in their pedagogy, (c) To determine the impacts of metacognitive knowledge on scholastic achievement and (d) To find out if there is gender disparities in metacognitive awareness among students. The research design that was adopted was descriptive survey design. The instruments for data collection were; Metacognitive awareness inventory for learners and Metacognitive awareness inventory for tutors. The MAIS and MAIT tools are self-reporting tools whereby the learners and teachers give their perception about their metacognitive awareness by answering a likert scale questionnaires with a number of statements capturing all aspects of metacognitive awareness. These tools had been tested and are known to have the recommended levels of reliability and consistency. Permission was sought from the owners of the instruments. Purposive sampling was used to sample three educational institutions within the County of Nairobi for the study. An aggregate of 300 form three students were sampled for this study from the three schools alongside 21 teachers, seven from each of the sampled schools randomly sampled. Analysis of data involved the computation of means and standard deviations and ANOVA to determine the relationships of the variables under study. The research findings revealed that learners in form three are average when it comes to metacognitive awareness in their daily learning endeavors. It was also discovered that teachers averagely engage metacognitive reflection in their daily teaching and learning pursuits. When comparative analysis of metacognitive awareness among students based on gender was done, it was evident that there was no significant differences among gender wise. The findings further proved that there is a strong positive correlation between students’ metacognitive awareness and academic performance in general