An Investigation of Three Metacognitive Measures

Metacognition, or the awareness and ability to control one’s cognitions, is hypothesized to play a central role in productive problem solving (Berardi-Coletta, Buyer, Dominowski, & Rellinger, 1995) and self-regulated learning (Zepeda, Richey, Ronevich, & Nokes-Malach, 2015). To assess metacognitive skills, different measures have been developed including questionnaires, verbal protocols, and metacognitive judgments. However, there is little research on whether these measures assess the same metacognitive processes (e.g., monitoring, debugging, and evaluation) or are related to the same learning outcomes (e.g., transfer and preparation for future learning). To address these issues we investigated whether these three measures captured the same metacognitive processes during a learning task and test. The results showed that evaluation skills as measured by verbal protocols were positively related to debugging and evaluation as measured by the task-based questionnaire. There were also unexpected negative associations between monitoring skills as measured by verbal protocols and the questionnaire and metacognitive judgments. There was no association between the monitoring questionnaire and metacognitive judgments. All three measures were related to learning, but the type of metacognitive skill, the direction of the effect, and the type of learning differed among the measures. Implications for future research and applications are discussed