The mediating role of metacognitive strategies in the effect of reading enjoyment on performance scores in PISA-2018 Turkey sample

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of the metacognitive strategies of enjoyment of reading, understanding and remembering, summarizing, assessing credibility on the performance scores of students from Turkey who participated in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Three different models were used to test whether reading enjoyment predicts students' reading, mathematics and science scores through metacognitive strategies. The data in the study were obtained through the PISA 2018 reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy tests and student questionnaire. As a result of cleaning the missing data, analyses were carried out with the data of 6104 students from the Turkish sample. In this thesis study, Process Macro plug-in was used in IBM SPSS program developed by Andrew F. Hayes for data analysis. In the analyses, 5000 Bootstrap samples with a 95% confidence interval were used by default and Model 4 analysis was applied among the possible models. Relational survey method was used as the research method. According to the first model, reading enjoyment predicts the mediator variables of metacognitive strategies and the mediation effect of metacognitive strategies was found. Reading enjoyment and metacognitive strategies explain 25% of the variability in reading score. According to the second model, reading enjoyment predicts the mediator variables of metacognitive strategies and the mediation effect of metacognitive strategies was found. The mathematic score is explained by metacognitive strategies, but not by reading enjoyment. Reading enjoyment and metacognitive strategies explain 17% of the variability in mathematic score. According to the third model, reading enjoyment predicts the mediator variables of metacognitive strategies and the mediation effect of metacognitive strategies was found. Reading enjoyment and metacognitive strategies explain 21% of the variability in science score.