Explaining Individual Differences in Metacognitive Monitoring: A Multilevel Analysis of Person-Level Predictors Across Academic Assessments

Metacognitive monitoring, students’ evaluations of their own performance, is central to self-regulated learning but often misaligns with actual performance. While situational factors have been studied extensively, less is known about how learning-related beliefs and motivational dispositions—hereafter termed learning-related attributes—relate to individual differences in metacognitive monitoring. This study examined how these learning attributes, alongside cognitive and demographic variables, were associated with students’ general confidence and resolution. Data were drawn from 3946 Chinese sixth-grade students who completed academic assessments in the verbal and mathematical domains, provided post-test performance estimates, and completed questionnaires measuring their learning attributes and demographic characteristics. We conducted multilevel analyses with a random-intercept–random-slope specification and identified several learning attributes as significant predictors of metacognitive monitoring, primarily in terms of general confidence. Adding learning-related attributes after the cognitive and demographic blocks increased marginal R2, primarily for general confidence; this order-dependent increment was not interpreted as evidence that the block is inherently more important. The findings extend existing accounts of metacognitive monitoring by suggesting that students’ general confidence is associated with non-cognitive learning attributes—and may thus be partly separable from cognitive ability—whereas their resolution is comparatively less strongly associated with these attributes. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.