Exploring the Sources of Turkish High School Students Chemistry Laboratory Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Motivations

Year 2018, Volume: 9 , 42 - 47, 18.08.2018

Fatma Alkan Nursel Koyuncu

Abstract

Self-efficacy
is a belief of individuals about their abilities to successfully complete an
action. Self-efficacy is defined as the judgments of individuals about
themselves on how successful they will be in dealing with difficult situations
they may encounter. Self-efficacy beliefs are related to individual judgments
about how well the necessary actions can be performed to handle possible
situations. These beliefs affect the choice of activities an individual wants
to do, the level of the efforts and the performance. Learners with strong
self-efficacy beliefs aim at new tasks, show stability in these tasks and
achieve ultimate success. This kind of learners’ trust in their abilities when
they confront with problems and motivate themselves. Motivation is necessary
for individuals to act as cognitively. Therefore, it is very important for
teachers knowing in advance of their students' motivation degree and
self-efficacy beliefs. In this research it is aimed that the analysis of the
relation between self-efficacy beliefs and motivation variables which are
highly effective on learning. For numerical analysis we studied 652 high school
students in Turkey. The data is collected with chemistry laboratory self-efficacy
beliefs scale and chemistry motivation scale. The correlation between the
variables are examined using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). With this
study we conclude that there is a positive and significant correlation between
chemistry laboratory self-efficacy beliefs and chemistry motivation. This
result can be interpreted that the person with high chemistry laboratory
self-efficacy has high chemistry motivation.

Keywords

Structural equation modeling, Multivariate analysis

References

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