Effectiveness of educational events designed for the development of metacognitive behaviours of prospective mathematics teachers

The main aim of this study is to design educational events for the development of metacognitive behaviours (that is metacognitive knowledge and skills), to implement these educational events and to investigate the effects of these events on the behaviours of prospective mathematics teachers.In the designed educational events included different techniques like writing, thinking aloud, pair problem solving and action card. We organized eight meetings (four of with writing, two of with thinking aloud, one of with pair problem solving and one of with action card) during the implementations of whole processes and these meeting were verified in 2005-2006 autumn and spring times.Six volunteer prospective mathematics teachers who were enrolled in 2000 at a large university in Ankara participated in this study. This study includes the findings obtained from the data collected from only the two participants to make detailed observations and to understand the process well. The research method of this study was case study. The data of this research were collected through observations, written documents; think aloud protocol, videotapes, and audiotapes of semi-structured interviews.The findings which we obtained indicated that having that kind of experiments improves the participants? knowledge about themselves, increases their metacognitive behaviours, more of these increases their awareness. Also, after this kind of experiments, participants began to work in a critical way and use the control strategies. Besides all of these, the most important thing is that the participants understood the reasons why they were not successful in the past.