Effectiveness of Metacognitive Strategy and Achievement Motivation Training on Dissertation Anxiety of Doctoral Students

Abstract

Completing a dissertation is an engaging and tough experience that requires academic skill, stamina, perseverance, and focus to defeat debilitating anxiety. The present study investigates the effect of metacognitive strategy and achievement motivation training on dissertation anxiety among doctoral students in three Nigerian universities. For this purpose, a pretest-posttest and control group experimental design was adopted. 84 male and female doctoral students were randomly selected from three government owned universities. Results show significant main effect of treatments on dissertation anxiety of participants while Metacognitive strategy proved more effective compared to Achievement Motivation training and the control group on measure of dissertation anxiety. However, the results show that there was no significant main effect of emotional intelligence and gender. Furthermore, interaction effects of treatments and emotional intelligence on dissertation anxiety was not significant. Likewise, there was an insignificant effect of three-way interaction effects of treatments, emotional intelligence and gender. Study recommends that doctoral students be exposed to cognitive based training as part of the orientation programme to enable doctoral students develop cognitive, affective and psycho-motive skills to handle their likely anxiety while writing the dissertation.