Relationship between Secondary School Students’ Cognitive Learning Skills and Academic Achievement in Physics in Anambra State

Abstract

In teaching and learning, memory processing skills of students determine how far they will gain from the learning activities. Based on this fact, this study investigated the relationship between secondary school students’ cognitive learning skills and their academic achievement in physics in Anambra State. Five research questions guided the study and three null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a correlation survey design. The population of the study consisted of 8,500 senior secondary school two (SS2) physics students in 258 governments owned secondary schools in the state. The sample for the study was 1000 SS 2 physics students drawn from 30 schools using multi-stage sampling. The instrument for data collection was researchers’ self-developed Cognitive Learning Skills Questionnaire (CLSQ) while the students’ achievement was obtained from their promotion examination results. The CLSQ was validated by three experts and its reliability established using Cronbach Alpha which gave coefficient value of 0.81. The data were collected by administering the questionnaire to the respondents. Mean, Pearson Product Moment Correlation and simple regression were used for data analysis. The findings showed that there was a high positive and significant relationship between cognitive learning skills and academic achievement of students in physics. There was also a significant positive relationship between cognitive learning skills and academic achievement of both male and female students in physics. Based on the findings, it was recommended that physics teachers should challenge students with learning materials that encourage them to constantly develop their cognitive skills towards meaningful learning.