Asian Journal of Education and Training

Due to limited numbers of published studies regarding the relationship between sports and cognitive functions in adolescents. So, this study compares the metacognitive awareness skill (MAS) levels between athletes and sedentary Turkish University Students. Data were collected from 434 voluntary male and 493 female university students by MAS inventory including sub-dimensions of knowledge about cognition and the regulation of cognition. Mann Whitney U tests were used for comparison between two groups. Also, Spearman rank order correlations were performed to analyze the relations between participating sports activities and sub-dimensions of MAS. This study showed that there was no significant difference in the favor of athlete participants in all sub-dimensions in male and female group. In females, sedentary participants had significantly higher values than athlete counterparts in all sub-dimensions of MAS. In sedentary group, females had significantly higher values than males in the sub-dimensions of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge and evaluation while males had significantly higher values than females in all sub-dimensions except debugging strategies in athlete group. Also, there were negative significant relationships between participation sport activities and all sub-dimensions of MASI scores in females while observing no significant relations among variables in males.: It can be concluded that females in the sedentary group and male in the athlete group had significantly higher MAS values. Participation in sport activities had no positive effect on MAS scores in both genders.