Assessment and Training of Metacognitive Skills

Metacognitive skills that involve the monitoring and control of cognitive skills like problem solving develop in expert executives and appear to lead to great improvement in the problem solving process. We propose to study the topic of metacognition to construct a conceptual model that has three characteristics: 1) it will show the interrelationship of metacognitive skills and cognitive task performance so that 2) it will suggest the most valid assessment technique for the measurement of metacognitive skills and 3) it will show the development of metacognitive skills. From the third characteristic, we will design a training program to accelerate the acquisition of metacognitive skills in officers in the US Armed Forces. From the second characteristic, we will construct proficiency tests of metacognitive skills for measuring the level of these skills in commanders at various levels of professional development; the tests can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the training.