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Abstract
Developing critical thinking helps learners and encourages them to express their opinions freely, ask questions, make their own decisions, plan for their work and actively participate in social concerns. In fact, educators support the idea that critical thinking should be a significant goal in educational institutions, to prepare students for the economic, social, and political changes that are likely to occur in the future.
One major educational aim is related to providing learners with efficient learning strategies. Metacognitive strategies give learners direction, and involve them in planning learning, monitoring progress or output, and evaluating what they have learned or how they have performed in the target language.
Metacognition refers to higher order thinking that involves active control over the thinking processes involved in learning. Activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task are metacognitive. Because metacognition plays a critical role in successful learning it is important for both students and teachers. Metacognition has been linked with intelligence and it has been shown that those who have greater metacognitive abilities tend to be more successful thinkers.
This study focused on the following metacognitive strategies: Planning and Questioning.
This study aimed at:
a.Designing a metacognitive strategies program to improve the critical thinking abilities that can be applied and modified to other students’ levels.
b.Investigating the relationship between the metacognitive strategies used by learners and their levels of critical thinking abilities.
Giving the apparent usefulness of the metacognitive strategies, there is a need to develop metacognitive strategies program for second Prep. Students to improve their critical thinking abilities and their use of the metacognitive strategies. Hence, the following research questions were generated:
1.What is the framework of a proposed program based on the use of the metacognitive strategies (Questioning and Planning) to improve the level of the critical thinking abilities?
2.What effect would the proposed metacognitive strategies program have on the improvement of the critical thinking abilities?
3.Would the proposed metacognitive strategies program lead to greater use of the metacognitive strategies?
4.Is there a significant relationship between the participants’ levels of the critical thinking abilities and their use of the selected metacognitive strategies?
.This study has proved empirical evidence that metacognitive strategies instruction improved critical thinking abilities of second preparatory students. It ,also, revealed that there is a significant positive correlation between the levels of the critical thinking abilities and the use of the metacognitive strategies among second preparatory students.