Effectiveness of Teachers' Metacognitive Knowledge Enhancement Program Instruction on Academic Performance and Fostering Creativity of Elementary Students

The aim of this research was determining the effectiveness of teacherschr('39') metacognitive knowledge enhancement program instruction on academic performance and fostering creativity of elementary students.

This study was semi-experimental with pretest and posttest design with control group. The research population was all third to fifth grades of elementary students of district one of Tehran city in 2016-17 academic years. The research sample was 120 students who were selected by cluster random sampling method and with method of simple random replaced into two equal groups (60 people in experimental group and 60 people in control group). The experimental group trained in metacognitive knowledge enhancement program instruction for 8 sessions of 2 hours and the control group did not received any training. The research instruments were the questionnaires of academic performance (Torrance, 1974) and fostering creativity (Pham and Taylor, 1999). Data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance method in SPSS-22 software.

The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in both variables of academic performance and fostering creativity. In the other words, teacherschr('39') metacognitive knowledge enhancement program instruction led to increased academic performance (all its components including self-efficacy, planning, emotional effect, lack of outcome control and motivation) and fostering creativity (all its components including flexibility, fluency, elaboration and originality) of elementary students (P<0.05).

Based on the results, teachers can use the teacherschr('39') metacognitive knowledge enhancement program instruction along with other educational methods to improve academic performance and fostering creativity of elementary students.