Cognitive Disposition, Self-Determination and Attitude to Keyboarding as Determinants of Students’ Achievement in Word Processing in Colleges of Education, South-West, Nigeria

The declining trend in performance of Business Education students in word processing has become worrisome to stakeholders most especially business education lecturers. This study therefore examined cognitive disposition, self-determination, and attitude to keyboarding as determinants of students’ achievement in word processing in colleges of education in South-West, Nigeria.This study adopted a descriptive survey research design type. A sample of 1,346 students was selected through stratified random sampling technique from a population of 6,035 college of education students in South-West, Nigeria. Five research instruments were used for data collection. They are: Demographic Data Inventory, Cognitive Disposition Inventory (=0.89), Self-Determination Scale (=0.86), Attitude to Keyboarding Scale (=0.76) and Word Processing Achievement Test (=0.89). The null hypotheses were tested using Multiple Regression Analysis at 0.05 level of significance.The finding revealed that cognitive disposition, self-determination, and attitude to keyboarding significantly predict students’ academic achievement in Word Processing (F(3, 1342) = 31.807, p <.05). In the same vein, cognitive disposition (= .317, t=21.605, p < .05), self-determination (=.226, t=12.449, p < .05), and attitude to keyboarding (=.208, t=10.194, p < .05) have relative contributions to the prediction of academic achievement in Word Processing among the students.It was therefore recommended, among others, that Business Education Lecturers in Colleges of Education should identify those strong cognitive disposition patterns in their classes and utilize fitting approaches to accommodate individual cognitive disposition preferences in their pedagogy. Educators should continually promote self-determination via both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation by helping learners to focus not only on the extrinsic rewards they gain after they accomplish tasks but to also inculcate the intrinsic value in their learning of Word Processing.