Effect of Metacognitive Awareness on Students’ Achievement in Mathematics in Public Secondary Schools in Kitui County, Kenya

Deep conceptual understanding enables learners to transfer new knowledge into new situations and apply it in new contexts. Individuals’ understandings of their thought processes as well as monitoring their progress is fundamental for deepening learners’ understanding and that may lead to improved performance. The overall students’ performance in mathematics at the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) has been low compared to other subjects. Students’ knowledge of facts and skills need to occur in the context of a meaningful and conceptual framework of subject matter that deepens learners’ understanding. The purpose of the study was to investigate effect of Metacognitive awareness on secondary school students’ achievement in mathematics. The Research employed a Quasi-experimental design and in particular Solomon, Four Design. A stratified random sampling technique was used to draw four boys’ and four girls’ extra county participating secondary schools. Assignment of the four schools in each category to either experimental or control group was done through simple random sampling. A sample size of 360 Form three students was used. Students in the experimental groups were taught Formulae and Variations using Metacognitive IMPROVE programme while control groups were taught the same topic using Conventional Teaching Approach (CTA). The instrument for data collection used was metacognitive Awareness Inventory Questionnaire (MAIQ). The overall reliability coefficient of MAIQ using Cronbach alpha obtained was 0.754. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean, percentages and Standard Deviation) and inferential statistics (test, one-way ANOVA and Post hoc Analysis). The hypotheses was tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data analysis was undertaken with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25.0 software. The results showed that students’ Metacognitive awareness resulted to students’ development of the skills of planning, monitoring and evaluating about their own cognitive activities and monitoring the approach they expected to be important for problem solving. The study recommends that teachers should organize the course contents to increase cognitive awareness of the students. Higher cognitive awareness demonstrates high levels of mathematics achievement therefore teacher proficiency need to be adjusted for better teaching and learning.