Social Goal Orientation, Academic Engagement and Creativity as Predictors of Secondary School Students’ Academic Achievement in Mathematics in Anambra State, Nigeria

Abstract

Social goal orientation, academic engagement and creativity are strong indicators and facilitators for effective learning. The association among these variables to jointly predict academic achievement has been vague and nebulous in the field of educational psychology. The study aimed to explore the students’ social goal orientation, academic engagement, and creativity as predictors of academic achievement in mathematics in Anambra State. Four research questions and three null hypotheses were formulated for the study. The study adopted a predictive correlational design. The population comprised of 21,204 SS II students from which a sample of 1560 was drawn using probability sampling procedure. Standardized research instruments such as; Social Goal Orientation Questionnaire (SGOQ), Students’ Academic Engagement Questionnaire (SAEQ) and Epstein Creativity Competencies Inventory (ECCI) developed by Epstein were used for data collection. Students’ mathematics achievement scores from the state wide promotion examination were used to represent mathematics achievement. Cronbach’s alpha was used to determine the reliability of the items in the instruments. A reliability indices were found to be .88, .82, and .92 for SGOQ, SAEQ and ECCI respectively. These scores made the instruments fit for the study. The standard multiple regression was used to analyze the collected data. The standard multiple regression was used to analyze the collected data. The research question 1 was answered using multiple regression. The research question 2 was answered using unstandardized β. The research question 3 was answered using adjusted R2. The research question 4 was answered using standardized β. The null hypothesis 1 was tested using F-test for regression model. The null hypothesis 2 was tested using t-test for adjusted R2. The null hypothesis 3 was tested using t-test for β at .05 level of significance. Findings showed that students social orientation, academic engagement and creativity scores yielded an adjusted R square of .007. This implies that predictors accounted for about 0.7% of the variance scores in academic achievement. Also, the analysis of variance indicated that the regression equation was significant in predicting academic achievement in mathematics. This implies that at least one of the independent variables significantly predicted academic achievement in mathematics. Based on these findings, it was recommended that students should consider social goal orientation, academic engagement and creativity as adaptive motivational variables that have jointly predict academic achievement.