REASSESSING SELF-ASSESSMENT OF ABILITY: POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF METACOGNITION.

This study was conducted to investigate the accuracy of self-report assessment in measuring cognitive ability, and its relationship with academic achievement and metacognitive skills. In order to do this, results of cognitive ability tests were compared to responses from self-report assessments of matched domains of ability. The discrepancy between tested and self-reported responses was then compared to academic achievement, and possible connection with metacognitive skills was examined. The study adopted a quantitative approach using cross-sectional descriptive research design. A self-report assessment of cognitive ability was developed to measure verbal, number and spatial ability by adapting several items from the MIDAS, (Shearer, 1996) and the SDQIII (Marsh, 1989) inventories. All measures were translated into the Malay language. Several sets of cognitive ability tests were used to get an objective measure of the matched abilities. The tests include a set of test that was self-developed (vocabulary test), extracts from SPM Bahasa Malaysia paper II examination as well as several tests from the Kit of Factor-Referenced Cognitive Tests (Ekstrom, French, Harman & Dermen, 1976). University achievement was measured by the students ’ cumulative grade point average (CGPA). A total of 465 second year UTM students from an engineering degree programme were involved in the study. Results indicate that the accuracy of self-assessment can be questioned and possible connection with metacognitive skills was suggested