The stated goal of this descriptive-correlational study was to investigate the metatextual awareness through a questionnaire especially designed for this purpose, examining its validity in relation to measures of reading comprehension and the criterion for differentiating the school level. 315 students enrolled in the 3rd to 5th grade of elementary public schools, whose ages ranged from 8 to 13 years, with 169 boys. The scores obtained with the measure of the metatextual awareness (QACM) were convergent with the score in reading comprehension and the instrument was sensitive to capture the children's progress in identifying the kinds of texts with the advancement of education. Thus, the study provided evidence of validity both in terms of convergence of constructs, identified based on measures related to criteria, distinguishing students by their level of education.
Psychometrics; Metatextual awareness; Cloze; Elementary school
