Thesis:

Title : Investigating the effect of self-directed metacognitive education on transformative teaching and academic challenge of elementary school teachers in District 7 of Mashhad

This study aimed to investigate the effect of metacognitive self-directed education on transformational teaching and academic challenge of elementary school teachers in District 7 of Mashhad. The present study is applied in terms of purpose and is of a semi-experimental type using a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The population of the present study consisted of all elementary school teachers in District 7 of Mashhad, 117 people. In order to select a statistical sample from the aforementioned statistical population, those teachers who were willing to cooperate were invited during a joint meeting to attend a research briefing session and then two transformative teaching and academic challenge questionnaires were distributed among them. Then, after scoring the questionnaire, 50 teachers were selected from those teachers who had lower scores and were randomly divided into two groups of 25 people. One group was given metacognitive self-directed education and the second group did not receive training. Then, after completing the training course, the questionnaires were distributed among the teachers again and compared after scoring again. The data collection tools included the Benishek and Lopez Academic Challenging Scale (2001), Beauchamp et al.'s Transformational Teaching Questionnaire (2010), and the Metacognitive Self-Directed Education Protocol based on the Karami et al.'s (2013) educational package. The data obtained were analyzed at the descriptive statistics level using the statistical characteristics of frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation, and at the inferential statistics level, using covariance and variance with the help of SPSS version 28 software. Considering the results, since the F value in the variables of transformational teaching and academic challenging is significant at the significance level of 0.01, the null hypothesis is rejected and the research hypothesis is confirmed with 99% confidence. In other words, metacognitive self-directed education is effective on transformational teaching and academic challenging of elementary teachers in District 7 of Mashhad. The eta value shows that 69.2 percent of the changes in transformational teaching and 76.6 percent of the changes in academic challenging were due to the effect of metacognitive self-directed education.

Keywords: Keywords: Metacognitive self-directed learning, transformative teaching, academic challenge