Identifying the Predictive Power of Biological Literacy and Attitudes Toward Biology in Academic Achievement in High School Students
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Abstract
The main aim of this study is to analyze the attitudes of 9th grade students who have taken biology course toward this lesson and their biological literacy levels, and to determine the predictive power of these variables in terms of students' academic achievement in biology. The study employed correlational method, which is a relational research design. The study group consisted of 407 students who were in 9th grade in an Eastern Anatolian province during the 2017-2018 academic year, and volunteered to participate in the study. The research data was gathered using “Biology Lesson Attitude Scale” that was developed by Tosun (2011) to measure students' attitudes toward biology course and "Biological Literacy Scale" developed by Soğuksu (2013) to assess biological literacy levels. Finding of the study was that; the students had high attitudes toward biology lesson and had high scores for biological literacy scale subfactors and were in structural biological literacy level for all the subfactors. The results of regression analysis in the findings section demonstrated that there was a positive correlation between biology lesson attitude scale score and academic achievement score, and attitude toward this lesson was relatively the most significant variable in the prediction of academic achievement. Furthermore, when other variables were controlled, there was a positive low correlation between academic achievement and "knowledge and use of knowledge" and "science and nature of science" subfactors of biological literacy scale, and a negative low correlation between "interest" subfactor and academic achievement.
Keywords
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