Educational Pshycology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The main aim of this research is to analyze critically the importance of career counseling on metacognitive skills and self-efficacy during the undergraduate studies. According to Herr (1997), career counseling, career guidance, and career interventions are general terms, which mean the process of evolution. In the lifespan development, people face different adjustment problems in different areas, particularly in their career: hence, there is a growing acknowledgement that career and personal counseling are fused in order to help people in terms of coping with different problems. Even though Mastropieri and Scruggs (2000) explain that metacognition is the knowledge about one’s own learning, in the development of metacognitive skills, during the career counseling sessions, people become more aware about their own cognitive skills and abilities. Therefore, cognitive oriented therapies help and develop alternative approaches as learning environment in which people have become active participants in the learning process. Additionally. As Zimmerman (1995) clearly mentions that metacognitive is not enough for people’s self-regulation. Hence, self-efficacy plays an important and crucial role. According to some important researches, Bandura (1993) and Countinho and Neuman (2008), both self-efficacy and metacognitive strategies (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, Kruger, 2003: Phakiti, 2003; Thiede et al.,2003: Zhang, 2012) work together in terms of better performances. Furthermore, self-efficacy has positive impacts on the development of metacognitive strategies, particularly in motivational aspect (Clause et al., 2001: Klassen, 2006) More importantly, strategy instruction, especially given during the career counseling sessions may improve self-efficacy (Graham, 2011). For that reason, in this study by using a phenomenological analysis, the effects of career counseling have been observed for three months on the metacognitive skills and self-efficcy of the 42 university students. After the career counseling sessions 18 research questions are answered in the semi-structured interviews and the data are analyzed through Atlas.ti 7 to understand deeply the reasons. The results show that since the career counseling sessions have increased self-efficacy of the large number (86%) of the participants, they strongly suggest career counseling sessions which improve their metacognitive skills. More critically, some of the participants (56%), especially those who are women, have pointed out that career counseling help them to reach their goals related to their business lives. Moreover, a large number of the participants (87%) emphasize that career counseling sessions do not help them only in self-efficacy, but in metacognitive skills: hence, inter- relationship and intra- relationship between self-efficacy and metacognitive skills are significantly powerful. During the sessions, the responsibilities and skills of metacognition and self-efficacy are transferred from the counselor to the participants.