Measurement of Metacognitive Awareness in First-Year Students

Metacognition refers to the ability to reflect upon, understand, and control one’s learning,and is considered a key competence in the effective management of learning process.Metacognitive awareness in 226 first-year students at Nagasaki University was measuredby using a self-report questionnaire developed by Abe and Ida (2010). This instrument consisted of twenty-eight items that had been classified by factor analysis into the threeprincipal features of metacognition (i.e., Monitoring, Control, and MetacognitiveKnowledge). Results of the measurement as well as those from a three-factor solution offactor analysis were described. In order to clarify the measured content and also to relieve response burden, a fifteen-item version of the original scale was constructed and was correlated to the learning outcome of a general education course commonly taken by the participants. No correlation was found, however, which leads to the necessity ofreexamination of the scale validity