Relationship between Metacognitive Awareness and Reflective Learning of Medical Students at the Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University

Aim: To examine the relationship between reflective thinking and metacognitive awareness to help medical students to be independent learners who can control their learning and improve their professional performance.

Study Design: It is a cross-sectional correlational study.

Place and Duration of the Study: This study was conducted at the Faculty of Medicine-Suez Canal University in August 2018.

Methodology: This is a cross-sectional correlational study; the study population included the undergraduate medical students in all study years at the Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University. The sample was 264 randomly selected students by using a cluster sampling technique. The instruments that were used for data collection were the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) to measure students’ metacognitive awareness levels, Reflection-in-Learning Scale (RLS) to measure the students’ reflective learning levels.

Results: The descriptive statistics of both MAI and RLS total scores of students in the six study years revealed that students have mean total MAI total scores = 178 ± 26 and have mean total RLS total scores = 60 ± 13.

The Spearman's correlation between the metacognitive awareness and the reflective learning skills of medical students revealed that there was a statistically significant high positive correlation between the metacognitive awareness and the reflection in the learning of FOM-SCU students (p= 0.699, p-value<0.0001).

Multiple regression analysis revealed that the weighted combination of the predictor variables explained approximately 50% of the variance of reflection in learning.

Conclusion: It is concluded from this study that the students at the Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University have fair to good metacognitive awareness and partial to ample reflective abilities. There is a significantly high positive relationship between metacognitive awareness and the reflective learning skills of medical students.