Scientific Literacy: The Mediating Role of Student’s Motivation and Perceived Relevance of Science Learning

This quantitative study aimed to model the mediating role of student’s motivation on the relationship between the students’ perceived relevance of science learning and their level of scientific literacy. It also aimed to propose an instructional material in teaching senior high school science based on these relationships. With structural equation modeling (SEM) as the primary technique used in analyzing the data, findings of the study confirmed that motivation partially mediates the relationship between students’ perceived relevance of science learning and their level of scientific literacy. Though perceived relevance of science exerts negative direct influence to scientific literacy, it exerts significant positive indirect influence through motivation as best explained by the Simple Serial Mediation Model of Relevance, Motivation and Scientific literacy. Considering the mathematical model of Motivation-Mediated Relevance and Scientific Literacy relationship, a learning material was designed and developed and was found to be acceptable based on expert’s evaluation in terms of the two domains: (1) alignment of content to the findings and technical components. Furthermore, the try-out on the sample lessons revealed a significant difference between the pre-test and post test scores of the respondents after using the developed material. However, due to some limitations of the study, it is recommended that further investigations may be done employing longitudinal methods and exploring other areas of senior high school core sciences.