Metacognition and learning from text: Constructing a metacognitive questionnaire for text studying

Teaching metacognitive strategies in learning from text is an important educational objective. So, metacognitive assessment methods are necessary within school settings. Although the advantages of metacognitive questionnaires are numerous, the convergent validity (correlation) with the thinking aloud method is generally moderate to low. This may be caused by the fact that the questionnaires were not constructed in line with activities measured by the think-aloud method. In a previous study we constructed a new questionnaire on the basis of a metacognitive taxonomy for think-aloud studies. This questionnaire reached a promising correlation with the results of the think-aloud method. In the present larger study, the internal consistency of the whole questionnaire was reasonable high. However, at scale level the internal consistencies appeared to be not convincing. This study gives direction to multimethod research for validating a task-specific questionnaire to other assessment methods aimed at metacognitive activities in learning from text.