A brief questionnaire on metacognition: Psychometric properties

Abstract

Objectives: Existing questionnaires on personal views of one's own cognitive functioning are either unduly long, restrict their focus on memory, and/or capture complaints rather than the general status quo. A brief 9-item questionnaire was developed, assessing metacognition with two subscales covering metamemory and metaconcentration.

Methods: The questionnaire was tested in a sample of healthy women (n = 228) aged 70–93 years, during two face-to-face interviews with an interval of 6 months.

Results: Subscales were confirmed to have factorial validity. While objective cognitive test performance did not predict self-reported everyday functioning, metamemory and metaconcentration accounted for a substantial amount of its variance. The newly developed instrument was shown to be predominantly characterized by latent trait variance components.

Conclusion: The presented questionnaire is advantageous for the assessment of metacognition as it is brief and easily applicable. Since metacognition is highly relevant for sustained independence in old age, the questionnaire is suitable to capture important determining factors in research on aging phenomena and processes.

Keywords:

• mental health assessments
• metamemory
• metaconcentration
• validity
• latent state–trait

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by non-profit entities: German Research Foundation – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; grant 429), and Gertrud and Hugo Adler Foundation. These sponsors had neither a role in study design, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, in writing the article, nor in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Conflicts of interest: We have no conflicts of interest.