One of the goals of the Latvian National Development Plan is to reduce the proportion of students with low cognitive skills, and at the same time increase the proportion of students with high level cognitive skills by the year 2020. In line with this goal, National Centre for Education has initiated a curriculum and educational assessment system reform.It is important to create assessment instruments for both: subject specific content and 21 st century skills, which are integrated in the learning outcomes in the revised curriculum.The aim of this study was to develop and pilot a new metacognitive awareness scale for 10-12 grade pupils. The instrument was based on the structure of the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw, & Sperling, 1994), creating new items and making them specific to the content of national level large-scale assessment in Science. A total of 1,257 pupils (48.4% boys, 51.6% girls) aged M = 15.30 (SD = 0.53) participated in the study.To find out the pupils' metacognitive awareness factors, 35 statements about different metacognitive activities were developed. Factor analysis showed good structure of 3 factorsplanning, monitoring, and evaluation, but weak structure of other possible factors. Internal consistency of the overall scale was good (α = 0.92). Discrimination and difficulty index levels meet accepted psychometric criteria. After multiple iterations, confirmatory factorial analysis revealed that 9-item model had good fit and good structure of three components: planning, monitoring, and evaluation.

The aim of the research was to explore Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Teachers (MAIT-18) psychometric data of adapted version in Latvia teachers population. Knowledge of teachers’ awareness of metacognition is required to support students’ self-regulation, with the purpose of establishing new learning methods and deep learning. Inventory was filled by 301 teachers. For the Latvia version of the inventory internal reliability, factorial and convergent validity was determined. In overall the reliability and validity of the MAIT-18 Latvian version correspond to the desirable psychometric criteria that were achieved during the development of the original instrument.

The association between depression and cognitive function has been observed in a large number of studies, but there are no clear and robust mechanisms for this association. The aim of this study was to investigate how cognitive functions (working memory inhibition, executive functions cognitive control and psychomotor speed) in one model predict depression above current core affect in a sample of healthy individuals. The study involved 275 adults aged between 20 and 59 years (male 32.7%) and used the depression scale from DASS-42 questionnaire, the Swedish Core affect scale, and the cognitive function task battery. The results of hierarchical regression analysis suggest that the depression is more significantly explained after controlling core affect by the working memory storage, inhibition, and executive function cognitive control processes, when performing several tasks with different valence words. This suggests that even in healthy individuals, there may be a significant association between depressive symptoms and cognitive function after controlling current core affect state which may fluctuate and not be reflected in the retrospective assessment.

There is growing evidence in the science of psychology that affective phenomena are not homogeneous and that their manifestations may vary across cultures and under the influence of contextual and demographic factors. Given that there is no clear universal expression of emotions and mood in human behavioral processes, it is necessary to continue to study the heterogeneity of the observed features in language and speech. This qualitative study analyzes the dialogues of 40 individuals in the field of telecommunications and, using a content analysis and phenomenological approach, describes lexical and non-lexical signs that could indicate features of affect. It can be observed that complete saturation has not been obtained within the framework of these data, which may indicate a wide variation of verbal and non-verbal affect features at both intra-individual and inter-individual levels and indicate different possible dialects of affect features. In addition, inter-rater reliability was determined and its results suggest that the determination of affective features may be subjective, contextual, in the absence of predefined reference criteria even in valence and activation dimensions of core affect.