An Empirical Examination of Metacognitive Models of Situation Assessment

This research questioned whether participants' metacognitive models of abstract cognitive components of situation assessment were correlated with performance on concrete experimental tasks necessitating situation assessment. In this experiment, 76 naval officers were asked to (a) represent as graphic weighted networks their metacognitive models of schema-driven tactical decision making, for which situation assessment is crucial, and (b) perform experimental tasks requiring categorizing and pairwise similarity ratings of tactical situations. Canonical, regression, and correlation analyses and multidimensional scaling established that 2 of 4 metacognitive link weights were significantly associated with (a) 3 of 6 measures of sorting performance and (b) 1 of 2 dimensions derived for the scaling solution of pairwise similarity ratings. These results partially supported what was theorized regarding individuals' metacognitive models and sorting and pairwise performance.