Factors Of Academic Achievement

This book focuses on the effect of psychological, social and demographic variables on student achievement and summarizes the current research findings in the field. It addresses the need for inclusive and interpretive studies in the field in order to interpret student achievement literature and suggests new pathways for further studies. Appropriately, a meta-analysis approach is used by the contributors to show the big picture to the researchers by analyzing and combining the findings from different independent studies. In particular, the authors compile various studies examining the relationship between student achievement and 21 psychological, social and demographic variables separately. The philosophy behind this book is to direct future research and practices rather than addressing the limits of current studies.

Nowadays, society is constantly changing, and new ways of life are being developed by due to nonstop technological advancements. This generates changes in family, schools, the media, etc. New technologies are creating virtual environments to manage learning and academic achievement, and this is a new challenge to approach formal and informal education. In the last few decades, teachers, families, and educational administrators had very well-defined fields of action and roles to play. Now, these roles are disfigured, and influences from all agents are arguable and more difficult to face. At this current stage, problems sometimes appear that require different forms of intervention. Some of the problems are violence towards people; child abuse; drug abuse at increasingly early ages; integration problems due to immigration; dropping out of school; and typical problems related to student development, personality, disabilities, social and psychical maladjustment, teenagers socioaffective relationships, etc. Research on school success and failure has a long history, but there is still no agreement concerning the prevalence of these variables to explain academic achievement, the relationship between those variables, and which other variables modulate their level of impact. For many years, cognitive psychology has emphasized cognitive function as the most relevant for learning in school. However, recent studies highlight the importance of motivational and affective functions in building consistent models to explain learning and academic achievement. This change of perspective, from the classical cognitive model to a self-regulated learning model, has implied a new orientation in the research of the factors involved in school success and failure. Self-regulated learning models try to integrate students cognitive, socioaffective, and behavioral aspects. These models describe the different components involved in successful learning at all school stages, explaining reciprocal relationships between those components and directly relating learning to personal achievement, motivation, volition, and emotions. With this new paradigm, students not only contribute to strengthening their intelligence, but also their motivational and emotional qualities, all related to achieving personal balance. This book presents studies, ideas, and recommendations to shed light on the complex educational world. Education has limits and difficulties, but it is also the only instrument that can develop students potential into personal success.

In this book, authors discuss research and theory on the social psychological forces that shape academic achievement. A key focus is to show how psychological principles can be used to foster achievement and make schooling a more enjoyable process. Topics are highly relevant to both social and educational psychology, with discussions of core concepts such as intelligence, motivation, self-esteem and self-concept, expectations and attributions, prejudice, and interpersonal and intergroup relations.

In academic achievement nature and nurture play a combined role. Nature implies certain innate or inherited factors such as intelligence, potentiality and personality while nurture contributing such things as may be found in homes, school, neighbourhood and the wider society. To ascertain the relative importance of nature and nurture is an arduos task. It endeavours to pinpoint such important factors as would give the reader a better understanding and insight into school success and failure.

Emotional, physical and social well-being describe human health from birth. Good health goes hand in hand with the ability to handle stress for the future. However, biological factors such as diet, life experiences such as drug abuse, bullying, burnout and social factors such as family and community support at the school stage tend to mold health problems, affecting academic achievements. This book is a compilation of current scientific information about the challenges that students, families and teachers face regarding health and academic achievements. Contributions also relate to how physical activity, psychosocial support and other interventions can be made to understand resilience and vulnerability to school desertion. This book will be of interest to readers from broad professional fields, non-specialist readers, and those involved in education policy.

Academic performance is determined by several factors. The aim of the first paper in this book is to describe the relationship between the goals of adolescents, their everyday life and the influence these factors have on academic achievement. Chapter two focuses on a longitudinal investigation of students' well-being experiences within the framework of motivational beliefs. Chapter three aims to analyze differences in academic self-attributions and learning strategies between aggressive and nonaggressive Spanish adolescents, and to identify the predictive role of self-attributions and learning strategies in academic promotion of aggressive Spanish adolescents. Chapter four analyzes a simulation software and sensitivity analysis for future student academic performance. Chapter five establishes how personal self-regulation and different contexts of stress produce differences in the coping strategies used by students, whether university students or graduates who are preparing for competitive exams. Chapter six provides a model with the main variables that can predict, with a certain degree of accuracy, school achievement and success, in order to put forward interventions and counseling to prevent students from dropping-out of health professions degree courses. Chapter seven critically reviews the different assessments and processes used within medical training and considers the affective implications for students, educators and eventually patients. Chapter eight addresses the teaching of physiology in different continents, and particularly, that of laboratories, and discusses a historical review of medicine in Mexico as well as the birth of Physiology in our country. Chapter nine analyzes student performance on the Grade 8 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) Mathematics exam for students in two Texas school districts to determine the extent to which differences were present as a function of Saxon Math instruction. The final chapter examines school district size and it's impact on black student performance.