The role of metacognitive skills in learning to solve problems

Study II: learning revisited 93
1 = correct answer), the alpha is equivalent to the Kuder-Richardson
20 (KR20). Because initially the reliability coefficients were rather low,
several items were deleted. The deleted items were distributed randomly
over the learning goals. After deletion version A of KMQUESTions contains
27 items for declarative knowledge (was 29) and 22 items for procedural
knowledge (was 22). Version B of KMQUESTions then contains
27 items for declarative knowledge (was 29) and 20 items for procedural
knowledge (was 22). In table 6.6 the results are shown. The reliability
of both versions is moderate to sufficient 2 .
Version A KR20 N
Declarative .76 16
Procedural .64 16
Version B KR20 N
Declarative .70 15
Procedural .56 15
Table 5.1. KR20 coefficients for the items of the subsets declarative and procedural
knowledge in both versions of KMQUESTions after deletion of items.
Pre-test
Post-test
Mean SD N Mean SD N
Group AB Declarative .45 .15 16 .63 .14 16
Group AB Procedural .47 .15 16 .71 .15 16
Group BA Declarative .43 .18 15 .54 .14 15
Group BA Procedural .48 .12 15 .57 .11 15
Declarative total sample .44 .16 31 .58 .14 31
Procedural total sample .46 .14 31 .64 .14 31
Table 5.2. Mean and standard deviation of the pre- and post-test parallel versions
of KMQUESTions, measured in proportion of correct answers.
2 Although the generally accepted value of 0.8 is appropriate for cognitive tests, the value
of 0.7 can be used for ability tests. However, when the construct being measured is ‘vague’
or ill-defined (such as KM), even lower coefficients can be expected (Kline, 1993) A rule of
thumb is that in general when coefficients are higher than 0.5 the ability measured dominates
the measurement error or noise in the data.