The effect of using metacognitive strategies on prospective science and technology teachers' achievements in special theory of relativity and attitudes towards quantum physics

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of using metacognitive strategies on prospective science and technology teachers? achievements in Special Theory of Relativity and attitudes towards quantum physics. This study has been constructed in accordance with the pretest-posttest control group experimental design model. The study group of research consists of two groups including 71 sophomore students from Science Education Program of Faculty of Education, Amasya University from 2011-2012 academic year. Out of 71 students, 36 are in experimental and 35 are in control group. The application has lasted for four weeks and included the Special Theory of Relativity of Introduction to Modern Physics. For the application of the study total of 16 hours were allocated to both groups, as 6 hours on theory and 10 hours on problem solving. The application of the theoretic part of the subject on both groups was carried out with exact same materials and simple lecture method was used. During the problem solving part, the problem solving activities via metacognitive strategies wereapplied for the experimental group and as for the control group, the traditional approach was used. As data collection tools: ?Achievement Test for Special Theory of Relativity (ATSTR)? developed by the researcher (2012); ?Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI)? developed by Schraw and Dennison (1994) and adapted to Turkish by Akın, Abacı and Çetin (2007); and ?Attitude Scale for the Quantum Physics? developed by Kocakülah and Kırtak (2010) have been used. Furthermore, 10 prospective teachers vifrom the experimental group were asked open-ended questions to obtain their views on problem solving activities via metacognitive strategies.For analyzing the data, paired samples t-test and independent samples t-test were used. The content analysis technique, is one of the approaches of qualitative analysis of the data, was used for analyzing prospective teachers? views on problem solving activities applied in the experimental group. As the result of the data analysis, it has been observed that the prospective teachers in the experimental group became more successful in the Special Theory of Relativity and exhibited increased positive attitude towards the course; whereas no increase has been observed in the control group. Based on the results of this study, it can be said that the prospective teachers can be successful and develop positive attitudes towards modern physics course by using metacognitive strategies. Also, it has been assumed that prospective teachers will not only solve the similar problems as in this study but also succeed in solving problems encountered in real life by using metacognitive strategies.Keywords: Metacognition, Metacognitive strategies, Problem Solving, Modern Physics, Achievement, Attitude