PREDICTION OF STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN PHYSICS BY SOME SELECTED PSYCHOLOGICAL VARIABLES: IMPLICATION FOR ENGINEERING CAREER

Inconsistency in the achievement of students, specifically in physics has become so worrisome. Based on this worrisome situation, various researchers have continued to study the effect or impact of some variables on students' achievement. To this end, the major purpose of this study is to determine the predictive power of some selected psychological variables on students' achievement in physics. Six hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. Correlational research design was adopted for the study. 5840 senior secondary school three (SSS3) physics students in all the government owned senior secondary schools in Onitsha education zone of Anambra state formed the population of the study. The sample size was 357 SSS3 students which was drawn from the population. The instrument for data collection were Physics Achievement Test (PAT), Academic Stress Questionnaire (ASQ), Self-efficacy Questionnaire (SQ) and Questionnaire on depression (QD). The instruments were face validated by experts from the Department of Science Education of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. PAT gave a reliability coefficient of 0.78 using Kuder-Richardson 20 (KR-20) formula. ASQ, SQ and QD gave reliability coefficient of 0.82, 0.87 and 0.88 respectively using Cronbach alpha formula. The findings of the study showed that the selected psychological variables (i.e. academic stress, depression and self -efficacy) have significant predictive power on students' achievement in physics. These findings implicate students' career interest in engineering in that if those variables are not adequately managed, they will impact negatively on the interest of students in engineering career. It was recommended among others that physics teachers, parents and school authorities should make students believe in their ability to succeed and excellently complete any task without the teachers' supervision or intervention.