Senior metacognition scale: evidence of validity, accuracy and standardization for the elderly

• Grant number: 13/07115-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2013
• End date: February 28, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Fundamentals and Assessments in Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Patrícia Waltz Schelini
• Grantee: Alex Bacadini França
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

New studies and ways of intervening with the elderly population are emerging, given that we now know that aging not necessarily accompanied by cognitive decline. Along with studies on other aspects of aging, the metacognitive processes that coordinate cognitive performance, have begun to acquire importance in the literature over the past four decades. Metacognition represents thoughts and knowledge that individuals have about their own thoughts and cognitive processes. Two of its basic elements are: metacognitive knowledge, characterized by awareness of the processes and skills necessary to perform a given task, and control or cognitive self-regulation, which includes judgment about the effectiveness of the strategies being used and the establishment of new ones. Considering that metacognition facilitates the effective performance of activities and given the lack of Brazilian instruments to measure it, previous to this project, was proposed the development of a scale for the assessment of metacognition among the elderly and analysis of the validity and accuracy of this scale. The first stage of the study involved the development of the Metacognition Scale - Senior (EMETA-S), for each topic, the participant, must choose from four possible answers, the one that best characterizes him or her. The second stage aimed to investigate evidence of content validity. For this step, the instructions and the 74 original items of the instrument were sent to three experts. The index of agreement resulting from the analysis of the responses of the experts was 68%. The scale was also tested with a sample of 15 participants (60 aged years or over) in verify whether or not the instructions and the items were understandable, which resulted in some changes in the wording of the instructions and items, as well as in the descriptors of the scale, constituting the third stage of the study. A factor analysis performed on the data gathered with a sample of 194 participants revealed the presence of two factors: self-regulation and metacognitive knowledge, accounting for 27.18% of the variance in the responses. After exclusion of items that had factor loadings below 0.30, items misunderstood by participants and items that were highly similar to others items, the final version of the EMETA-S was composed of 27 items, with internal consistency of 0.85. No significant differences were found between the average performance with respect to variables such as gender, education and age of participants. The analysis of the validity and accuracy of the items indicated suitability of the concept initially proposed and good internal consistency of the scale. With the need to conduct additional studies about the psychometric parameters to compose the set of criteria for the use of EMETA-S, this project aims: to gain further evidence of validity and reliability as well as the standardization for elderly population in order to allow an individual results are compared to the reference group and the normative group. Participants in the study 400 subjects aged over 60 years and both genders. After application, a comparison will be made between measures of Senior Scale Metacognition to verify the feasibility of establishing normative data separately on the basis of age by performing the t-test with a significance level of 0.05. Moreover, it will be also analyzed to determine the normative scores for EMETA-S based on age groups previously established by calculating the percentiles for each. (AU)