Locus of Control as Predictor of Secondary School Students' Interest in Chemistry in Anambra State, Nigeria

The study investigated on locus of control LoC as predictor of secondary school students’ interest in Chemistry in Anambra State, Nigeria. Two research questions guided the study while two hypotheses were tested at .05 alpha level. The moderated mediation design was adopted. The population of the study comprised 16,590 senior secondary two students offering Chemistry in all the public secondary schools in Anambra State. The sample size of this study consists of 964 senior secondary school two Chemistry students drawn from 113 co-education secondary schools out of the 263 public secondary schools in Anambra State. The sample was drawn using multi-stage sampling procedure. Academic Locus Of Control Scale (ALOCS) adapted from Trice academic locus of control scale (1985) and Chemistry Interest scale (CIS) adapted from Ojo (2015) were the instruments used for data collection. The instruments were validated by three experts. The reliability of the instruments were established using Cronbach alpha method. The reliability coefficients of ALOCS and CIS were found to be 0.79 and 0.81. Coefficient r and R2 were used to answer research question while linear regression were used to test the hypotheses. The findings from the results revealed that LoC significantly predicted interest in Chemistry (r = .347, R² = .120, p < .05) and LoC significantly predicted interest in Chemistry when moderated by gender (r = .3537, R² = .1251, p < .05). It was concluded that LoC modestly boosts secondary students’ Chemistry interest; gender moderates this effect. It was recommended that Chemistry teachers should foster LoC.