Abstract

This study explores how teachers from different cultures communicate implicitly and explicitly epistemologies to their students through both their teaching demands and teacher-student interactions. It relates differences in teachers’ epistemic discourse to differences in their students’ metacognitive levels. In order to do this a tool for the analysis of classroom talk was developed based on Hofer and Pintrich's (1997) work, to allow the reliable study of teachers’ framing of knowledge in terms of its source, complexity, and justification. The tool demonstrated to support the reliable analysis of teaching in significantly different subjects (i.e. Literacy and Science) and classrooms from different countries (i.e. British, Malaysian and Chilean contexts). On the other hand, students’ development of self-regulated learning aspects was explored through observational methods. This involved analyzing their individual activities within an experimental task using an observational scale (PS-SBOS), considerably adapted and expanded from an already existent scale in order to achieve higher sensitivity to pedagogical actions fostering metacognition. This study centered in English and Chilean classrooms which reflect more empiricist and rationalist philosophical traditions, respectively. The study of teacher’s epistemic discourse is still under analysis. Nevertheless, multiple statistically significant differences in self-regulation aspects found across the 8-9 year old students from both participating countries may allow to conclude about the appropriateness of considering teachers’ epistemic discourse as a new avenue for promoting metacognitive abilities. The study may also inform the broader academic benefits of connecting the two lines of enquiry centered on epistemologies and metacognition development