Abstract:
The purpose of the present research was to examine the relationship between middle
school students’ metacognitive skills, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics
achievement. The research was a correlational study. A total of 190 middle school 7th
graders participated in the study. Metacognitive skills 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. Mathematics achievement was the dependent variable, and
metacognitive skills and mathematics self-efficacy were the independent variables in
the research. According to the findings, no significant difference was detected
between 7th-grade students’ mathematics scores in terms of gender variable. When
the relationship between the variables are examined, it was revealed that there was
a positive and high-level relationship between mathematics self-efficacy and
mathematics achievement; however, a positive but low-level relationship was found
out between metacognitive skills and mathematics achievement. It was unearthed
that students’ metacognitive skills predicted their mathematics achievement in a
positive way; about 18% of students’ mathematics achievement was predicted by
their metacognitive skills. The personal experiences sub-dimension of mathematics
self-efficacy explained about 60% of the total variance in mathematics achievement
by itself. Other sub-dimensions were excluded from regression analysis and
calculations. Furthermore, students’ metacognitive skills and mathematics selfefficacy
explained about 52% of the total variance regarding their mathematics
achievement.
