A comparison of types of knowledge of cognition of pre-service biology teachers http://www.ied.edu.hk/apfslt/v17

Metacognitive knowledge (declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge) present differences in their means and standard deviations. The data description for declarative knowledge (DK), procedural knowledge (PK), and conditional knowledge (CK) are shown in Table I.

Table I. Description of the values for knowledge of cognition

Knowledge of cognition - type	N	Mean	Std. deviation	Std. error	Minimum	Maximum
DK	122	72.85	8.93223	.80869	50.00	95.00
PK	122	73.98	10.92685	.98927	45.00	100.00
CK	122	76.72	9.14191	.82767	56.00	100.00
Total	366	74.52	9.19461	.51318	45.00	100.00

The summary of the results of the normality test of the distribution of the data related to the three types of knowledge is presented in Table II.

Table II. Summary of normality test results

Knowledge	Shapiro-Wilk test
Knowledge	Statistic	df	p
DK	.988	122	.359
PK	.980	122	.061
CK	.979	122	.054

Furthermore, the summary of the results of the homogeneity test using Levene’s test are presented in Table III.

Table III. Summary of the results of the statistics test

Levene statistic	df1	df2	p
2.830	2	363	.060

The two assumption-test results show that hypothesis testing can be performed. The summary of the ANOVA test is presented in Table IV.

Table IV. Summary of the ANOVA test

	Sum of squares	df	Mean square	F	p
Between groups	968.272	2	484.136	5.137	.006
Within groups	34213.395	363	94.252
Total	35181.667	365

The results of the ANOVA test presented in Table IV show that there are significant differences between the three types of metacognitive knowledge, namely DK, PK, and CK. To determine which knowledge of cognition is the most different, a post hoc analysis was performed. The summary of the post hoc test using LSD is presented in Table V.

Table V. Summary of LSD test results on the cognitive knowledge of biology students

Knowledge type	Average	LSD notation
DK	72.8484	a
PK	73.9754	a
CK	76.7213	b

Table V shows that there was no significant difference between DK and PK. The most striking difference was for CK, which had the highest average among the knowledge types, and significantly differed from DK and PK. It is the case that the three types of knowledge are interrelated with one another; declarative knowledge supports procedural knowledge and conditional knowledge.