Metacognitive awareness and academic locus of control as the predictors of academic adjustment

Abstract

This study attempted to examine the impacts of academic locus of control and metacognitive awareness on the academic adjustment of the student participants. The convenient sampling was applied to select the sample of 368 participants comprising 246 internals with age ranging from 17 to 28 years (M = 20.52, SD = 2.10) and 122 externals with age spanning from 17 to 28 years (M = 20.57, SD = 2.08). The findings indicated that there were significant differences in the various dimensions of metacognition, academic lifestyle and academic achievement of the internals and externals except for academic motivation and overall academic adjustment. There were significant gender differences in declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, planning, information management, monitoring, evaluation and overall metacognitive awareness. Likewise, the internals and externals differed significantly in their mean scores of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, planning, information management, monitoring, debugging, evaluation and overall metacognitive awareness, academic lifestyle and academic achievement. The significant positive correlations existed between the scores of metacognitive awareness and academic adjustment. It was evident that the internal academic locus of control and metacognitive awareness were significant predictors of academic adjustment of the students. The findings have been discussed in the light of recent findings of the field. The findings of the study have significant implications to understand the academic success and adjustment of the students and thus, relevant for teachers, educationists, policy makers and parents. The future directions for the researchers and limitations of the study have also been discussed.