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Teacher preparation programs have acknowledged the need to address the topic of collaboration in coursework; however, few educator preparation programs require collaboration courses or address the interpersonal aspects involved in teaching in other required courses. Working with families is essential in the field of special education and pre-service teachers must be given opportunities to develop their collaborative practices in teacher preparation programs. The use of virtual simulation is emerging in the field of teacher education and is a tool faculty can use to provide pre-service teachers a safe environment to practice parent–teacher conferencing skills within courses.

No abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact explicit teaching of metacognition had on preservice teachers’ metacognitive awareness and accuracy of whole group discussions using virtual simulations. One class of preservice teachers was randomly assigned to the explicit metacognitive teaching group, while the other class was assigned to the information-only group. A total of 40 nontraditional preservice teachers participated in the research study. A pre-, mid-, and post-assessment quasi-experimental design was employed. The independent variables were the two training groups (explicit metacognitive teaching group and information-only group). The dependent variables were preservice teachers’ self-reported metacognitive awareness, the researchers’ metacognitive awareness rubric scores, and metacognitive accuracy. The results revealed that engaging in the virtual simulation experiences improved preservice teachers’ metacognitive awareness of leading a whole group discussion and that preservice teachers were overconfident in assessing their metacognitive awareness.