The research aims at exploring Indonesian pre-service biology teachers’ metacognitive skills, measuring the development of learning strategies (LS) used by the teachers before and after the learning process, and describing the teachers’ responses afterwards. There were 25 subjects studied using a pretest- posttest design. Results showed that there was an increase in students’ metacognitive skills and their LS knowledge. Morever, they stated that they had got a lot of benefits after the learning process. This research concludes that metacognitive strategy can be used to teach LS so that students can broaden their LS understanding and thus enable to choose LS that fits them.

The presented paper focuses on the impact of intervention with the application of the SMARTS program on students’ metacognitive abilities. The metacognitive program SMARTS, a product of RILD1 (Research Institute for Learning and Development, Lexington, Massachusetts, the author Lynn Meltzer), was translated, adapted, and pilot-tested in the Slovak educational context conditions. In the form of qualitative intervention case studies, the paper analyses (1) the diagnostic potential of SMARTS revealing deficits in students’ metacognitive abilities (organisation and prioritisation), (2) an intervention to improve a student’s specific metacognitive ability, (3) outcome (stagnation/progress/ regression) of the intervention. The results obtained by direct participatory observation applied in the intervention point to a possible positive impact of the SMARTS program on the observed metacognitive abilities of students.

This study aimed to identify the levels of meta-behavioural skills among students from the categories of students without problem behaviour (SWOPB) and students with problem behaviour (SWPB). The sample of the study comprised 803 respondents, 398 students from the SWOPB category and 405 from the SWPB category. Meta-Behavioural Self-Evaluation questionnaire was used to measure meta-behavioural skills of the respondents. Research findings show that the metabehavioural skills of students from the SWOPB category were better compared to SWPB. The findings also show that both groups lack conditional knowledge which is an important aspect of effective behaviour regulation, but the score for the SWPB group is very low (mean=1.55) as compared to the SWOPB group (mean =2.34). It can be hypothesized that conditional knowledge is one of the factors that should be promoted to help decrease problematic behaviour in schools.