The anticipated impact for target groups (teachers and students)
Students:
The project is expected to:
(a) promote students’ metacognitive awareness about the process of learning and the construction of knowledge, their personal academic strengths and weaknesses and the demands of various tasks and achievement situations;
(b) enhance students’ metacognitive skills as regards planning, monitoring and regulating their own learning and problem solving activities. Within the classroom, students’ improved metacognitive skills are expected, in turn, to enhance self-regulation of their learning process as well as their learning outcomes.
(c) Students are expected to develop their strategic thinking via the development of their declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge base about the “what” strategies, “how” to apply them, “why”, and “when” to use different learning and thinking strategies appropriately and flexibly.
(d) The project is also expected to develop students’ ability to understand other people’s mental states as well as their own.
This improved ability is expected to boost students’ social interactions and their capacity to successfully function in their social environments.
Teachers:
The project will help teachers to:
(a) become more aware of their epistemological beliefs about the process of learning and the construction of knowledge;
(b) become aware of their own and their students’ metacognitive and theory of mind skills and the importance of these skills for students’ learning and social adaptation.
Within the classroom, teachers’ enhanced awareness is expected to have a positive impact on the ways they teach students to reflect on:
(a) how they think and learn and
(b) the causal role of mental states in initiating, guiding and controlling action.
Finally, in collaboration with the Educational Departments of our Universities and where possible with the Pedagogical Institutes we will integrate the design and the training program in the development of trainning programs for educators and students (as this will add extra value to the project’s aims and reslts).