Predicting physics achievement: attitude towards physics, self-efficacy of learning physics, and mathematics achievement

Debates still continue on improving students’ science achievement all over the world today. Many of the countries determine their national science education standards and put these standards into their national curricula to increase students’ science achievement (see National Research Council [NRC], 1996). Some science teaching strategies that believed to be more influential in increasing students’ science achievement are also espoused in these curricula. For example, according to NRC (1996) in USA, students’ active involvement in learning science by engaging them with inquiry-based hands-on or laboratory activities is important to develop the students’ science achievement and science process skills. Furthermore, countries compete with each other in some international assessments; one of them is TIMSS that measures students’ science and mathematics achievement. The major criterion to rank the countries’ success is students’ science and mathematics scores in the TIMSS (Mullis & Martin, 2013). It can be claimed that each attempt for improving science education is closely related to students’ science achievement. Considering the science achievement as an important outcome variable, this study aims to explore how Turkish high school students’ attitude towards physics, self-efficacy of learning physics and mathematics achievement predict their physics achievement.