Development of Metacognition Awareness Scale for 10th–12th Grade

One of the goals of the Latvian National Development Plan is to reduce the proportion of students with low cognitive skills, and at the same time increase the proportion of students with high level cognitive skills by the year 2020. In line with this goal, National Centre for Education has initiated a curriculum and educational assessment system reform. It is important to create assessment instruments for both: subject specific content and 21st century skills, which are integrated in the learning outcomes in the revised curriculum. The aim of this study was to develop and pilot a new metacognitive awareness scale for 10–12 grade pupils. The instrument was based on the structure of the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw, & Sperling, 1994), creating new items and making them specific to the content of national level large-scale assessment in Science. A total of 1,257 pupils (48.4% boys, 51.6% girls) aged M = 15.30 (SD = 0.53) participated in the study. To find out the pupils’ metacognitive awareness factors, 35 statements about different metacognitive activities were developed. Factor analysis showed good structure of 3 factors – planning, monitoring, and evaluation, but weak structure of other possible factors. Internal consistency of the overall scale was good (α = 0.92). Discrimination and difficulty index levels meet accepted psychometric criteria. After multiple iterations, confirmatory factorial analysis revealed that 9-item model had good fit and good structure of three components: planning, monitoring, and evaluation.