The Importance Of Personality Traits In Students' Perceptions Of Metacognitive Awareness

Abstract

This study sought to investigate the role of personality traits on metacognitive awareness among preservice English teachers in a Turkish context. A total of 102 students participated in the study. The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 2001) and the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI; Schraw & Dennison, 1994) were used to measure the participants' perceptions of their personality traits and metacognitive awareness. Findings revealed a statistically significant relationship between personality traits and metacognitive awareness. The analysis of moment structures (AMOS) indicated that personality traits have a strong predictive power in determining metacognitive awareness among the participants, accounting for 29% of the variance in the knowledge of cognition (KOC) component and 28% of the variance in the regulation of cognition (ROC) component. The scrutiny of multiple squared correlations further revealed that openness to experience and extraversion emerged as the strongest predictors of academic motivation, respectively. These findings are interpreted to provide a better understanding of the importance of personality traits, especially the Big-Five personality traits, in students' impressions of their metacognitive awareness in learning a second or a foreign language (L2). (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.