Relationship between students’ metacognitive skill and students’ Interest in Biology in public secondary schools in Anambra State, Nigeria

The poor performance of students and their lack of interest in Biology in public secondary schools in the State are major concerns in science education, which are sometimes worsened by the lack of empirical clarity on the effect of cognitive regulation on students' interest for learning Biology in public secondary schools in the State. This study examined the relation between the metacognitive skills and Biology interest of the students in the state. The sampling was done in two stages and a total number of 637 SS 2 students from 18 schools in the Awka and Otuocha education zone were sampled. The Students' Self-Regulatory Skills Scale, Students' Biology Interest Scale and official term grades were used to collect data. Face and construct validities were determined for the instruments while Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients were 0.80 and 0.79. Pearson correlation and multiple regression were used for analyzing the data at the significance level of 0.05. The findings on the relationship between students metacognitive skills and their interest in Biology as obtained in Anambra State public secondary schools showed a low and positive correlation. But the alpha value associated with the test of significance was far greater than .05. Thus, the null hypothesis was not rejected. It showed that there is no statistically significant correlation between metacognitive skills and students' interest in Biology, which means that the cognitive self-regulation by itself is not statistically significant predictor of students' interest in Biology in secondary school level.