Relations of Gender and Socioeconomic Status to Physics Through Metacognition and Self-Efficacy

ABSTRACT

The authors explored how gender and socioeconomic status (SES) predicted physics achievement as mediated by metacognition and physics self-efficacy. Data were collected from 338 high school students. The model designed for exploring how gender and SES-related differences in physics achievement were explained through metacognition and physics self-efficacy was tested. The result showed that metacognition and physics self-efficacy could explain gender- and SES-related differences in physics achievement. In addition, it was observed that physics self-efficacy mediated the relation of metacognition to physics achievement whereas metacognition did not. This finding means that metacognition contributed to physics achievement through physics self-efficacy.

Keywords:

• gender
• metacognition
• physics self-efficacy
• socioeconomic status
• structural equation modeling

Notes

Instead of gender, we used male for the variable name because young men were coded as 1 and young women were coded as 0. For example, if we had coded young women as 1, the coefficient for self-efficacy would have been negative and it would have meant that young women had lower self-efficacy levels. As a result, in such a case, the results reported previously would be the same except for only signs of the regression

coefficients.