Recent Publications in Collaboration

The research starts from an observation: explicit teaching of self-regulation strategies is more common in social sciences and humanities programs than in engineering, where reflection on one’s own learning process tends to take a back seat. To explore this gap, the team administered the MAI to students from two engineering programs with different curricular structures and compared the results using multivariate analysis of variance.

Food Engineering students scored higher on most regulation scales, with marked differences in planning, organization, and debugging. Systems Engineering students, by contrast, showed stronger correlations among planning, monitoring, and evaluation, suggesting a more integrated development of these skills. The authors interpret these differences as a reflection of the distinct cognitive demands and curricular structures of each discipline, and argue for incorporating explicit metacognitive training into engineering curricula.

Although affective processes are known to play a role in metacognition, few studies integrate both variables, and research on self-regulated learning in Peru remains limited. This work addresses that gap by administering the 18-item short form of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire together with the Metacognitive Strategies Inventory, both previously validated in the Peruvian population.

The analysis used structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation. The results indicate that two maladaptive strategies, blaming others and catastrophizing, are inversely related to metacognitive performance, while refocusing on planning shows the strongest positive association. The authors link the first finding to locus of control theory and conclude that university education should include training in both metacognitive strategies and emotional regulation.

The relationship between personality traits and metacognitive performance has received little attention, even though it could explain part of the variability observed in metacognitive intervention programs. This work addresses the question by administering the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory and the Adjective Checklist for Personality Assessment to undergraduate students from five Latin American countries, with multiple regression analyses conducted separately for each national sample.

Despite cultural and linguistic differences, two factors emerged consistently: openness to new experiences predicted conditional knowledge in all samples and, together with conscientiousness, predicted different components of metacognitive regulation, although the specific pattern varied by country. In the Costa Rican sample, the relationship extended to debugging, information management, and evaluation, which the authors link to the country’s educational policies on metacognition. The hypothesis of a negative relationship between neuroticism and metacognition was not confirmed.

Many students enter university with a limited repertoire of reading strategies and little awareness of their own reading performance, which affects their achievement in programs that require critical reading of scientific and argumentative texts. The tests available in Spanish for young adults have limitations in ecological validity and in their alignment with the kinds of texts read at university.

The instrument was analyzed using the Rasch model, assessing unidimensionality, item difficulty, and item discrimination. The results support the internal structure of the test, with adequate separation reliability indices for both items and persons. Some items did not show sufficient fit and were discarded. The authors propose the ELCU as an early diagnostic tool to help institutions identify reading strengths and weaknesses at the start of university studies.

Metacognition is defined as a higher-order thinking skill that enables people to monitor, control, and regulate their thinking and behavior. It is especially relevant in education, since students need to self-regulate their learning behaviors in order to learn in a sustained way throughout life. It is therefore essential that both teachers and students know their own metacognitive skills, and that researchers have robust and valid quantitative measures.

No measure is used more often for this purpose than the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. In this study, the International Group on Metacognition validated the MAI using a standard international Spanish, with a sample of 1,622 undergraduate students from 12 Spanish-speaking countries.

The results revealed a robust confirmatory factor analysis model for all 12 countries, supporting the original two-factor structure described in English-speaking samples from the United States. Multigroup measurement invariance analyses showed that, although five parameters varied slightly in some countries, chi-square difference tests did not indicate a significant improvement of the comparison model over the constrained model, supporting measurement invariance across countries. The authors conclude that this international Spanish version of the MAI is a valid and reliable tool for measuring metacognitive awareness in Spanish-speaking countries.

The review followed the PRISMA statement and searched the Science Direct, Scopus, and Springer databases, starting from 711 full-text studies and applying inclusion criteria that left 61 articles for analysis. The studies were classified into three categories: predictive, concurrent, and postdictive judgments.

The findings indicate that postdictive judgments account for half of the research in the period and tend to be more accurate, since students have more information after completing the task. Predictive judgments influence academic performance, although their effectiveness varies with the context and the learner’s characteristics. Concurrent judgments are the least studied and may even distract students by requiring several metacognitive functions at once. The authors recommend integrating all three types of judgment into educational processes and improving the instruments that measure them.

Understanding the factors that influence metacognition is especially pressing in today’s digital age, when information circulates constantly and rapidly. With that purpose, the study explored the role of culture as a mediator of how people experience metacognitive phenomena.

The International Group on Metacognition developed a rigorous international protocol for measuring metacognition in Spanish-speaking university students (N = 1,461) from 12 cultures in Latin America and Spain. The protocol combines a subjective measure of metacognitive awareness, the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, with several objective metacognitive monitoring metrics across three learning domains: vocabulary, probabilities (mathematical reasoning), and paper folding (visual-spatial reasoning).

The data were compared across cultures using as outcomes subjective metacognitive awareness and the raw frequencies of the four mutually exclusive cells of the 2 × 2 performance-by-judgment matrix. The results revealed significant differences in the macro-level components of subjective metacognitive awareness, in both knowledge and regulation of cognition. Significant differences by culture also emerged in the raw frequencies of the four cells, most markedly in the vocabulary domain, where differences between cultures appeared in all four cells.

The study administered the University Reading Strategies and Comprehension test through an automated platform, which made it possible to work with a large, representative sample from different regions of Chile. The instrument was designed from a cognitive diagnostic assessment approach that covers cognitive, metacognitive, and linguistic strategies.

The data were analyzed with two complementary approaches. The rejection of the linear logistic model indicates that the strategies assessed do not differ in cognitive complexity, while the good fit of the DINA model makes it possible to classify students according to the skills they have mastered. The authors note that the share of students admitted without having consolidated these basic skills justifies implementing remedial programs before university entry.

Although research on metacognition and on cognitive styles is well established in each field separately, few studies have addressed them together. No previous study had examined specific aspects of metacognition, such as monitoring ability, in relation to cognitive style.

The study investigated measures of confidence, performance, and accuracy for three types of metacognitive judgments —predictive, concurrent, and postdictive— and three types of metacognitive questions: about the task, about oneself, and at different points in the process (before, during, and after). These measures were related to cognitive style, classified as field-dependent, intermediate, or field-independent, in a sample of 57 Colombian university students.

The results revealed differences in the accuracy and bias of metacognitive monitoring according to cognitive style, with similar findings across points in the process and types of judgment. Individuals with an intermediate or field-independent cognitive style reported greater monitoring accuracy and less bias than those with a field-dependent style. The article discusses implications for research, theory, and practice.

Metacognitive skills, such as knowing when and why to apply a strategy according to task demands, or monitoring one’s own comprehension, are essential for effective learning. However, the debate over whether these skills are domain-general or domain-specific remains open among specialists. If they were domain-specific, significant differences should be observed between disciplines; if they were domain-general, they should not.

The study examined this question in a sample of 507 Colombian students of education (n = 156), psychology (n = 166), and medicine (n = 185), using the Spanish version of the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. Eight scales were analyzed, grouped into knowledge of cognition (declarative, procedural, and conditional) and regulation of cognition (planning, information management, debugging, comprehension monitoring, and evaluation).

The results revealed significant differences in all skills except two, procedural knowledge and debugging, which mostly supports the domain-specificity hypothesis while partially supporting the domain-general view.

The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory was originally developed in English by Schraw and Dennison in 1994 to measure metacognitive skills. Since its initial validation it has become the most widely used self-report instrument in the world for assessing these skills, which is why it has been translated and used in several languages. Research on its psychometric structure has shown high internal consistency reliability and adequate construct validity.

However, no study had yet examined whether the instrument in its original form maintains, when used in Spanish, a factor structure consistent with the one described by Schraw and Dennison. This work addresses that question and also seeks to provide empirical evidence on the practical use of the instrument with Spanish-speaking university student populations.

The study examined the relationship between mothers’ and fathers’ parenting styles, children’s self-concept, and both subjective and objective measures of metacognition, in order to determine whether self-concept and parenting style predict metacognitive performance.

The study used a convenience sample of 196 students from a public school and a quantitative correlational design. Ordinary least squares regression models were used to estimate the extent to which parenting styles and children’s self-concept predict subjective metacognitive awareness and objective metacognitive monitoring.

Parenting styles predicted metacognition in three learning domains —reading comprehension, mathematics, and similarities— although in different ways in each case. Children’s self-concept was also a predictor in all three domains. The authors conclude that education must extend beyond school to include the family, and that educational outreach initiatives should address not only how family life affects academic performance, but also how it shapes the development of metacognitive skills.

Understanding how unobservable constructs operate as a function of culture and language is an important goal for psychological research. Because language and culture strongly influence how psychological phenomena are experienced, latent constructs may not function universally across cultures and languages.

The purpose of the study was twofold. First, a cultural adaptation process was carried out for the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Teachers, a 24-item instrument originally developed by Balcikanli in 2011. Second, the translated instrument was tested and validated with a sample of Colombian teachers (N = 755), based on a factor structure modified from the one proposed in the original validation study.

The results showed that, after removing three items that did not fit the model, the factor structure proposed by the team for the 21-item MAIT-R version demonstrated excellent fit to the data.

Personality characteristics and self-regulated learning skills, such as metacognition, significantly influence everyday decisions ranging from whom to interact with to what to learn and at what pace. The aim of the study was to establish the predictive value of different personality factors for metacognitive knowledge and regulation in students in the final semester of teacher education programs.

The study involved 135 Colombian students from different undergraduate Education programs, who completed the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Teachers (MAIT) and the Adjectives for Personality Assessment instrument (AEP, for its Spanish acronym). The research questions were addressed by combining descriptive and inferential statistics.

The findings indicate that conscientiousness was the only personality characteristic that positively predicted declarative and conditional knowledge, as well as planning and monitoring, but not procedural knowledge or evaluation. The authors highlight the need for further research on how personality factors affect self-regulated learning skills, in order to strengthen students’ capacity for self-regulation and their future performance as teachers.