An investigation of the relationship between middle school students' metacognitive skills, mathematics self-efficacy and mathematics achievement

The main purpose of the research was to examine the relationship between middle school students' metacognitive skills, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics achievement. A total of 190 middle school 7th graders participated in the study. The research was designed as correlational research. Metacognitive awareness scale which is a sub-scale of motivating skills in learning scale and the resources of self-efficacy scale were used as data collection tools. The variables in the research were metacognitive skills, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics achievement. Of these variables, mathematics achievement was the dependent variable and metacognitive skills and mathematics self-efficacy were the independent variables. In order to reveal whether students' mathematics achievement significantly differed according to gender variable, independent samples t-test was used, and Pearson correlation analysis was employed to detect the relationship between the variables. Furthermore, basic linear regression analysis and multiple regression analysis were employed to determine the predictive power of metacognitive skills and mathematics self-efficacy on mathematics achievement. According to the findings of the research, there was not a significant difference between students' mathematics scores in terms of gender. Moreover, when the predictive power of metacognitive skills and mathematics self-efficacy on mathematics achievement was examined, it was found that 18% of mathematics achievement was predicted by metacognitive skills. According to stepwise multiple regression analysis performed to determine the predictive power of mathematics self-efficacy on mathematics achievement, personal experiences dimension explained 60% of the total variance regarding mathematics achievement by itself. Other dimensions were not included in the regression analysis. Students' metacognitive skills and mathematics self-efficacy explained 52% of the total variance in their mathematics achievement.