Exploratory Analysis of Intellectual Abilities, Metacognitive Skills and Academic Performance of Rural Adolescents

The present study was undertaken to analyse the relationship between intellectual abilities, metacognitive skills and academic performance of rural adolescents (13-16 years). The study was conducted in Government schools in villages of Ludhiana-I Block. The final sample comprised 240 rural school-going adolescents (N=240) studying in grade 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th. The subjects were equally distributed across both the genders (Males=120 and Females=120) and all the grades. To assess the metacognitive skills of the adolescents, a Self-Structured Metacognitive Questionnaire adapted from Metacognition Inventory (Govil 2003) and Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw&Dennison 1994) was used. Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven 1960) was used to assess the intellectual abilities of the selected subjects, whereas the academic performance was assessed through aggregate percentage of marks/ grades obtained by the subject in the last school examination substantiated by teacher ratings. It was found that majority of the adolescents had an 'Average' level of metacognition. 'Above Average' and 'Average' level of Intellectual Abilities and Grade A' and 'Grade B' level of Academic Performance. However, gender differentials were found to be non-significant in distribution across the various levels of Intellectual Abilities, Metacognition as well as Academic Performance. Further, the subjects were found to be reasonably well in their Procedural skills, Declarative Knowledge, Evaluation, Comprehension, Monitoring and Planning aspects, but were quite weak in some of the learning strategies like Conditional Knowledge, Debugging and Information Management Strategies.