Revising the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) and testing for factorial invariance

Kouider Mokhtari,Dimiter M. Dimitrov,Carla A. Reichard

doi:10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.3

Abstract

In this study, we revised the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), a self-report instrument designed to assess students’ awareness of reading strategies when reading school-related materials. We collected evidence of structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised inventory (MARSI-R). We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the MARSI instrument, which resulted in the reduction of the number of strategy statements from 30 to 15. We then tested MARSI-R for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups and found that there is a uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements across these groups, thus allowing for their comparison on levels of metacognitive processing skills. We found evidence of the external validity aspect of MARSI-R data through correlations of such data with a measure of the students’ perceived reading ability. Given that this journal is oriented to second language learning and teaching, our article also includes comments on the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), which was based on the original MARSI and was designed to assess adolescents’ and adults’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of ESL reading strategies. We provide a copy of the MARSI-R instrument and discuss the implications of the study’s findings in light of new and emerging insights relative to assessing students’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies.

Highlights

During the past two decades, reading researchers and practitioners have eagerly welcomed the re-emergence of scholarly interest in the role of metacognitive processing in students’ reading comprehension performance
The examination of the values for the goodness-of-fit indexes used in this study and the modification indices (MIs) reported in Mplus suggested the need for modification of the original factorial model for the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI)
Based on the examination of these misspecifications and related substantive considerations, we modified the original MARSI to the revised version, MARSI-R, with five items per latent factor, for a total of 15 items

Summary

Introduction

During the past two decades, reading researchers and practitioners have eagerly welcomed the re-emergence of scholarly interest in the role of metacognitive processing in students’ reading comprehension performance This renewed interest can be seen in the writing of several edited volumes devoted exclusively to the topic of metacognition (e.g., Garner, 1987; Hacker, Dunlosky, & Graesser, 1998; Hartman, 2001; Israel, Block, Bauserman, & Kinnucan-Welsch; 2005; Snow, 2002), the publication of a large number of articles addressing various aspects of metacognition and reading in scholarly journals, and the inclusion in several recently published books of instructional frameworks to guide the teaching of metacognitive reading strategies (e.g., Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; Pressley, 2000). It is generally assumed that strategy use (metacognition, metacomprehension) are separable constructs from the underlying skills germane to the target task. (MacNamara, 2011, p. 159)

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