Metacognitive Awareness in University Studies: The Comparative Study of Lithuanian and Iranian Cases

Abstract

The aim of the research is to compare both students’ and lecturers’ attitudes towards the metacognitive awareness in university studies on the basis of Lithuanian and Iranian cases and describe the dependency between those attitudes and learning processes. Mixed methods research was applied in this study. The research results according to lecturers’ attitudes toward their students’ metacognitive awareness level and their own pedagogical knowledge indicated that the sequence of weakest to strongest knowledge of cognition subcomponents was “conditional”, “procedural” and “declarative”. The regulation of cognition subcomponents of both groups had a similar pattern, with the Lithuanian group having had lower scores in “information management” and “debugging”, the Iranian group having had lower scores in “monitoring” and “debugging” respectively. The metacognitive awareness levels of both student groups based on lecturers’ attitudes were medium. Moreover, it can be confirmed that both lecturer groups had rich pedagogical knowledge, though they mostly related the concept of metacognitive awareness with its “cognitive” dimension rather than the “strategic” and “affective” one. Furthermore, a clear connection between lecturers’ and students’ attitudes emerged. Comparisons were made across the systematic review of literature of both Lithuanian and Iranian published papers within the last two decades in university contexts which a number of similar findings emerged.