Abstract
Teaching competence is a set of personal characteristics or habits that results in more effective and superior job performance. Thus in this study, the researcher tried to determine the influence of metacognitive awareness and work task motivation on the teaching competence of public elementary school teachers in Region XI, conceptualized through the pragmatic philosophical worldview. Mixed methods research approach specifically the convergent design was employed in this study. Public elementary school teachers in the Davao Region served as respondents, purposively chosen both for the quantitative phase and in the focus group discussion and in-depth interview for the qualitative phase. Adapted questionnaires and interview guides were utilized for the gathering of data. Statistical tools like mean, standard deviation, and multiple regression analysis were used to analyze the quantitative data while thematic analysis was applied in the qualitative phase. Findings revealed that the status of metacognitive awareness, work task motivation, and teaching competence were rated very high among public elementary school teachers. Further, in an individual capacity, the metacognitive awareness of public elementary school teachers was not a significant predictor of the teaching competence of public elementary school teachers. Furthermore, results indicated that work task motivation was a significant predictor of the teaching competence of public elementary school teachers. However, the combined effect of metacognitive awareness and work task motivation as predictors of teaching competence was a good fit for the data in this study. Moreover, essential themes emerged from the thematic analysis of the participants’ lived experiences such as; appropriateness of learning-task designs, mindfulness of teaching-learning strategies, established teacher presence, higher-level thinking skills reinforcement, and discipline and morale maintenance. More so, the participants’ experiences played a significant role in shaping their beliefs, which resulted in the theme of teaching with a heart, for their attitudes, the theme that emerged was thoughtfulness in pedagogy, and for their commitment, it was steadfast in teaching. Interestingly, mixing the salient quantitative and qualitative findings revealed the merging-converging nature and function of data integration.
