Hacettepe Egitim Dergisi, vol.34, no.4, pp.999-1014, 2019 (Scopus)
Based on the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, this study aimed to determine the extent to which affective characteristics such as epistemic beliefs, motivation and self-efficacy predicted students’ performance in science and whether this differed between countries that exhibited different levels of achievement. In accordance with the purpose of the study, two countries were randomly selected from each of the three achievement levels defined by PISA (above average, average, and below average) and all the students that took the test from the selected countries were included in the analysis. A simple linear regression analysis was performed using the IDB Analyzer program, which facilitated the analysis of the layered data collected in this study. According to the results, it was determined that the students’ affective characteristics predicted their science performance by 30% regardless of the achievement level.