An Investigation of Subjective Metacognitive Awareness and Objective Absolute Monitoring Accuracy among Undergraduate Students from China, Colombia, Spain, and the U.S.: The Role of Culture

Metacognition is understood as the knowledge and regulation of one’s own cognitive activity that deals with one’s agency over mental processes in a conscious and deliberate way. However, the role culture plays on individuals’ experiences of metacognition and metacognitive awareness is not well understood. Thus, the present study explored the influence of culture on self-report metacognitive awareness (via the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory) and objective absolute metacognitive monitoring accuracy (i.e., a comparison of individuals’ confidence in performance judgments against actual performance) across three academic domains (vocabulary, probabilities, and paper folding [assesses visual-spatial reasoning]) in a sample of 366 undergraduate students from four countries (China, Colombia, Spain, and the U.S.). Results revealed that metacognitive awareness is not a universally conceptualized construct. Not only were correlational patterns distinct across cultures, but there were significant differences among the four cultures in both a finer- and coarser-grained analysis. Further, results of objective absolute monitoring accuracy indicated that, incongruent with the self-report findings, participants from the Chinese sample exhibited significantly poorer absolute monitoring accuracy in vocabulary and paper folding, but that participants from all four countries manifested similar absolute monitoring accuracy in a probabilities task. These findings have profound repercussions for how culture influences theory, applied research, measurement, and practice regarding metacognitive awareness and absolute metacognitive monitoring accuracy.