Assessing Adolescent Metacognitive Skills to Support Transition Planning: Age-Related Change and Domain Specificity

Metacognitive ability supports both self-regulated academic learning and effective social communication. It is critical to adolescents’ ability to successfully transition from secondary education to adult contexts, underscoring the need to understand age-related changes beyond childhood. There have been conflicting findings on whether metacognition is a general ability that applies to both learning and social communication, or an ability specific to each domain. In this observational study, 35 transition-age adolescents (14–22 years) of varied social communication abilities completed measures of metacognition for learning and metacognition for social communication. Each metacognitive measure included self-knowledge and self-regulation components. Metacognition for social communication increased with participant age but metacognition for learning did not. Metacognitive measures for learning and social communication did not significantly correlate. The self-regulation component of metacognition for social communication predicted pragmatic language ability, but self-regulation for learning did not. The findings suggest that metacognition is a domain-specific ability that contributes to social communication competence.