The impact of metacognitive awareness on the academic performance in mathematics of senior high school students from Korle Klottey Municipal.

Abstract

This study examined how metacognition awareness affects academic performance. Metacognition is the cognitive process of reflecting on and monitoring one's own thinking. The investigation took place at Korle Klottey Municipal from January to September 2023 and was a cross-sectional analytical study. Three hundred and fourteen final-year senior high school students from Korle Klottey Municipal were selected through a stratified random sampling technique, which included one hundred and seventy from Accra High School and one hundred and forty-four from Osu Presec School. The tool for data collection was the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. The academic performance in mathematics of the students was measured based on the first mock examination. The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) has a reliability coefficient of 0.89, indicating high consistency. The data were entered into Jamovi statistical software. This study's independent variable was metacognitive score, and the dependent variable was academic performance. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficients, independent t-tests, simple linear regression, multiple linear regression, and one-way ANOVA. The result showed that only 45 –50% of the students have above-average metacognitive skills. Metacognition dimensions also correlated positively with academic performance in mathematics (r = 0.632) and indicated a significant result at p < 0.01. There is also no significant gender difference in metacognitive awareness. The metacognitive skill explains 40% of the variability in academic performance in mathematics of the students, which implies that the students' metacognitive skills influence and determine their academic performance in mathematics to some extent. Also, students' procedural knowledge, planning, information management strategies, comprehension monitoring, and debugging strategies account for variation in metacognitive skills. Thus, it is suggested that metacognitive skills should be integrated into curricular components and learning strategies, which will help the students monitor and regulate their own learning to meet the challenges of academic society.