Evaluation of Psychometric Adequacy of Metacognitive Awareness Inventory in Indian Sample

The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) developed by Schraw and Dennison (1994) assesses metacognitive awareness of individuals in terms of 'knowledge of metacognitions' and 'regulation of cognitions'. In an attempt to ascertain psychometric adequacy and factor structure of MAI in Indian cultural setting exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed by administering 52 items of MAI on 15 to 17 years old students (n = 326) of English medium School in Roorkee city of Uttrakhand, India. The obtained results indicated good internal consistency with fairly good reliability indices of the two factors extracted and the whole scale and an acceptable construct and convergent validity. However, out of 52 items only 25 items meaningfully loaded on two factors in EFA followed by CFA by AMOS, and the two factors were assigned their original names 'knowledge of cognition' (KC) and 'regulation of cognition' (RC). The CFA indicated that 25-items MAI had an acceptable model fit indicating good construct validity in Indian setting, and the scale was named as 'MAI-short version'. The gender and streams of education differences also demonstrated that the scale has good predictive validity. The KC, RC subscales as well as whole MAI-short version correlated significantly positively with academic grade percentages of the students, however, the 'r' values were low indicating an acceptable convergent validity of the instrument.