Related to human learning, calibration is defined as the accuracy of the people’s judgment about their actual performance (Pieschl, 2009). With the broader definition it is “the degree to which individuals’ judgments about their understanding, capability, competence, or preparedness correspond to the understanding, capability, competence, or preparedness they actually manifest” (Alexander, 2013, p. 1). For instance, if a student predicts to get a high grade in an exam and his/her actual grade is high, then the student could be defined as well calibrated. On the contrary, if the student predicts to get a high grade, however, his/her actual grade is low, then it means the student lacks calibration. Thus, when the distance between the predicted and the actual performance gets closer, one could be defined as well calibrated.

Research indicate that inaccurate judgments of capabilities can influence self- regulation such as utilizing cognitive and metacognitive strategies (Alexander, 2013). In other words, simple metacognitive questions such as “How much effort do I need to understand?” or “Did I understand completely?” may help develop calibration skills. Therefore, expecting a close relationship between calibration and metacognitive skills would be reasonable.

Thus, research questions of the current study are:

1. How well preservice elementary teachers are calibrated in chemistry course?
2. What is the degree of relationship between metacognitive strategy use and calibration in chemistry course for preservice elementary teachers?

The design of the current study is non-experimental correlational study. 73 pre-service teachers enrolled to General Chemistry course participated in the study. At the end of the course a chemistry achievement test and Metacognition sub scale of Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was administered to the participants. MSLQ is a battery of scales developed for assessing a number of motivation constructs and learning strategies. It is developed by Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, and McKeachie (1991). MSLQ is a self-report instrument on a seven-point Likert scale, (1 = not at all true of me to 7 = very true of me). Achievement test is a multiple choice test which included 30 items related to the chemistry topics covered during the classes. Calibration scores are calculated based on the consistency between responses and predictions about the correctness of the responses. For example, if a student correctly or wrongly responses to the item and predicts it as “absolutely sure that I will solve the exercise correctly” or “absolutely sure that I will solve the exercise wrong”, respectively, then the student gets two points. If a student correctly or wrongly responds to the item and predicts “I will solve the exercise correctly” or “I will solve the exercise wrong”, respectively, then the student gets one point. In other cases, student gets zero points. For thirty items, every student will get a calibration score. Then the data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlation analysis.

It is expected that the results of the study will comply with the previous research. Students who are well calibrated will score high in the metacognition measure. Thus a positive relationship between calibration and metacognition is expected. However, considering that outstanding studies in the calibration literature are conducted with students at higher education level, results of the current study may differ from the ones in the related literature. Since calibration is asserted to have close relationship with aspects of self-regulation, teacher preparation programs may benefit from this study and place more attention on developing self-regulatory skills of preservice teachers.

Alexander, P. A. (2013). Calibration: What is it and why it matters? An introduction to the special issue on calibrating calibration. Learning and Instruction, 24(1), 1–3. doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2012.10.003 Pieschl, S. (2009). Metacognitive calibration-an extended conceptualization and potential applications. Metacognition and Learning, 4, 3-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11409-008-9030-4. Pintrich, P. R., Smith, D., Garcia, T., & McKeachie, W. J. (1991). A manual for the use of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Technical Report 91-B-004). The Regents of the University of Michigan.