The effect of turkish students’ motivational beliefs on their metacognitive self-regulation in Physics

Descriptive statistics was used to determine the introductory physics course students’ metacognitive self-regulation, learning goal, performance goal, and self-efficacy belief levels in physics. Mean, standard deviation, kurtosis, and skewness values regarding these scales are given in Table 1. It was determined that the students’ mean scores of the metacognitive self-regulation, learning goal orientation, and self-efficacy belief in physics were high, but their performance goal orientation was at a moderate level.

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics

	MSRP	LG	PG	SE
Mean	4.89	3.01	2.30	3.26
Std.Dev.	11.91	2.94	2.99	2.33
Skewness	-.41	-.63	-.74	.10
Kurtosis	-.51	-.26	.25	-.56
N	187	187	187	187

The results of the Pearson correlation analysis conducted among the metacognitive self-regulation, learning goal, performance goal, and self-efficacy belief in physics are presented in Table 2. The results of the correlation analysis revealed a moderate, positive and significant correlation between use of metacognitive self-regulation in physics and learning goal orientation and a low, positive, and significant correlation between the use of metacognitive self-regulation in physics and physics self-efficacy belief. Furthermore, a low, positive, and significant correlation was found between physics self-efficacy belief and learning goal orientation and a low, negative but significant correlation was determined between physics self-efficacy belief and performance goal orientation.

Table 2. Pearson Correlation Analysis

	MSRP	LG	PG
LG	.53^**
PG	.08	.03
SE	.42^**	.37^**	.15^**
^**Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level.

A stepwise multiple regression analysis was performed to examine how well the students’ learning goal orientation, performance goal orientation and physics self-efficacy belief predict their metacognitive strategy use in physics. Multiple regression assumptions were tested before conducting the stepwise multiple regression analyses. Accordingly, it was seen that the sample size was sufficient according to the formula: N > 50+8m (Tabachnick & Fidel, 1996) considering the number of independent variables. Since the number of independent variables was two, with 187 > 74 the assumption of sample size adequacy was met. VIF values were also calculated to examine the multicollinearity assumption. It was determined that VIF value was lower than 10. Therefore, there was no violation of this assumption. Besides, an extreme value did not occur and normality and linearity assumptions were met in the study.

According to the results of the stepwise multiple regression analysis (Table 3), the main variable that explained the metacognitive self-regulation in physics was learning goal orientation (R2= .28; F(1, 185) = 69.76, p < .05). When physics self-efficacy was added to the model with learning goal orientation, it was seen that both variables provided significant contribution and the overall model explained the 33 % of the variance of the metacognitive self-regulation in physics (F(2, 184) = 15.18, p < .05). The direction of the correlation between the metacognitive self-regulation in physics and physics self-efficacy was positive. However, it was seen that performance goal orientation did not predict the metacognitive self-regulation in physics.

Table 3. Stepwise Multiple Regression Analyses for the Use of Metacognitive Self-Regulation

Model

Std.Error.

Beta

Collinearity Statistics

Sig.

VIF

1 (Constant)

Learning goal

26.757
2.118

3.898
0.254

0.523

6.874
8.352

.000
.000

1.000

2 (Constant)

Learning goal

Self-efficacy

15.583

1.737

1.295

4.722

0.263

0.333

0.429

0.253

3.300

6.594

3.896

.001

.000

.001

1.161

Dependent Variable: Metacognitive self-regulation