The transition phase is a critical moment to students who have completed their secondary school education and are proceeding to pre-university education in Malaysia. The long duration of exposure to rote-learning and examination oriented education systems at school has somehow shaped these students' perceptions about teaching and learning. Thus, this paper aims to examine the quality of first year students' experiences in constructing their knowledge and skills throughout the Foundation in Engineering (FIE) programme. This experience refers to metacognitive awareness, namely students' learning experience from one mode of thinking to the other to construct meaningful knowledge and skills. The researchers used the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) (Schraw and Dennison, 1994) as a rating tool to trace the students' baseline in metacognition and access their successive levels of metacognitive awareness throughout their first semester in the FIE program. The students showed improvements in a number of metacognitive sub-processes. The findings provided the details of the quality of the program's efficacy and served as a benchmark for future development of effectiveness of teaching and learning approaches.