Objective:

The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) was originally developed in English by Schraw and Dennison in 1994 to measure metacognitive skills. Since its initial validation, the MAI has been employed countless times in various languages -mainly English- to assess individuals’ self-report metacognitive skills, with the instrument consistently reporting high internal consistency reliability and adequate construct validity. However, no research to date has examined whether the instrument, when used in languages other than English, maintains a consistent factor structure to that reported by Schraw and Dennison. Further, the present study sought to provide empirical evidence of the practical use of this instrument in Spanish-speaking populations.

Method:

Thus, the present study investigated the factor structure of the MAI in Spanish in a robust sample of Colombian undergraduate students (N=528). Regarding age and gender, 315 identified themselves as female and 213 as male, between 20 and 30 years old (M=23,90; Median=23). First, exploratory factor analyses (EFA) with common factor extraction (principal axis factoring) and an oblique rotation (promax) were employed, followed by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA; standard and higher-order). In the EFA phase, three models were compared, an initial solution of 10 factors followed by one with eight and one with two factors. In the CFA phase, two competing models were evaluated, a 10-factor higher-order model and a two-factor model.

Results:

Findings revealed that, in the EFA phase, the two-factor solution yielded the best fit compared to the other two. In the CFA phase, like the original 1994 validation study, the eight-factor solution comprised of each individual component was ill fitting to the data; however, a two-factor solution (knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition) exhibited superior fit to the data and was a significantly better model compared to the eight-factor solution, which mirrors the findings of the 1994 validation study.

Conclusions:

This Spanish version of the MAI demonstrates appropriate internal consistency reliability and construct validity metrics. Thus, researchers and practitioners can employ the measure to examine metacognitive awareness in Spanish-speaking samples.

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