Assessing teachers’ knowledge of teaching thinking and metacognition (TKTM): a new research tool

With metacognition becoming an increasingly important topic for practitioners and researchers, we need reliable and accessible research tools addressing metacognition. Currently, there is no research tool that measures all the relevant components of teachers’ knowledge, thereby creating an impediment to research and to the ability to adjust professional development (PD) to teachers’ knowledge. This paper describes the construction and validation of a new research tool, the TKTM (Teachers’ Knowledge of Thinking and Metacognition) for characterizing and measuring teachers’ knowledge of metacognitive teaching in the context of fostering students’ higher-order thinking. Teachers are asked to write a structured lesson plan at the beginning of a PD program and to improve it at the end of the program. Teachers’ knowledge is identified and measured using two rubrics – mapping and scoring, which provide qualitative and quantitative data for improving both research and PD.