Academic Achievement

Academic achievement is a marker of positive adjustment during adolescence and sets the stage for future educational and occupational opportunities. It can be defined as reaching, or even exceeding, the goals of a curriculum and improving academically (Ozcan, 2021). The most serious consequence of school failure, particularly dropping out of school, is a high risk of unemployment or underemployment in adulthood.

Many people, including psychologists, equate intelligence with the successful completion of academically related tasks. The first ever intelligence test, the Binet-Simon test, was specifically created to identify French students who may struggle with the curriculum in French schools (Binet & Simon, 1915). So, do those with high IQ scores have a natural advantage to do well in academic settings? Not necessarily. While general intelligence can be a good predictor of academic achievement, there are other environmental and personal factors that affect it (Lozano-Blasco et al., 2022).

Factors Affecting Academic Achievement

Interpersonal relationships are the socially and emotionally fulfilling connections made between people. For students, this is their family, friends, teachers, and coaches. The support and engagement that a child receives for their education impacts how well they will do academically (Ozcan, 2021). If the people involved in a child’s life value education, that child is more likely to value it as well (Zhang, 2022). However, too much pressure to perform well academically, especially from parents, can have adverse effects on a child’s mental health (Deb et al., 2015).

The institutional environment plays a role in academic achievement as well. The funding that the school receives, the way material is taught, the quality of the social atmosphere, and the perceived safety of the students all contribute to a school’s climate (Darling-Hammond & DePaoli, 2020; Nisar et al., 2017). An overall positive school climate is one that supports learning. Students who attend schools with a good climate have better study habits and higher academic achievement compared to those at schools with a poorer climate (Nisar et al., 2017)

Intrapersonal factors are those that come from within an individual. For academic achievement, this can be attitudes towards education, self-management strategies, adaptability, and personal identity (Amir et al., 2021; Okwuduba et al., 2021). One of the biggest contributors to a student’s academic achievement is their motivation.

Motivation and Academic Achievement

Motivation varies and is demonstrated by the kind of goals that students set for themselves. Some goals encourage academic achievement more than others, but even the ones that do not explicitly concern academics tend to indirectly affect learning.

Students can hold different types of achievement goals (Alrakaf, 2014). Those with mastery goals want to understand and master the material because they find it interesting or believe it will be useful later. Other students are concerned less about learning the content and more about getting high grades; they have a performance goal to look successful in front of peers and teachers. Students with performance-avoidance goals want to avoid a poor or failing grade, so they are less concerned about learning or competitive success.

Mastery, performance, and performance-avoidance goals are often experienced in combinations. If you play the clarinet in the school band, you might want to improve your technique simply because you enjoy playing well (a mastery goal). However, you might also want to look talented in the eyes of classmates (a performance goal), or at the very least, avoid looking like a complete failure at playing the clarinet (a performance-avoidance goal). One of these motives may predominate over the others, but they can all be present simultaneously.

Mastery goals tend to be associated with the enjoyment of learning the material and, by definition, are a form of intrinsic motivation (Cerasoli & Ford, 2014). As such, mastery goals are better at sustaining students’ interest in a subject than performance goals are. In one research review, students with mastery goals for a class not only tended to express greater and continued interest in the course, but even enrolled in more courses in the same subject after (Harackiewicz, et al., 2002).

Video 8.5 Instincts, Arousal, Needs, and Drives: Drive-Reduction and Cognitive Theories explain some intrinsic motivations.

Performance goals, on the other hand, imply extrinsic motivation and tend to have mixed effects on a student (Grajcevci & Shala, 2017). A positive effect is that students with a performance goal tend to get higher grades than those with a mastery goal. Higher grades occur both in the short term with individual assignments and in the long term with overall grade point average. However, there is evidence that performance oriented students do not actually learn the material as deeply as students who are mastery oriented (Midgley et al., 2001). A possible reason is that measures of performance, such as test scores, often reward relatively shallow memorization of information rather than deep, thoughtful processing.

Video 8.6 Incentive Theory explains extrinsic motivation.

Performance-avoidance goals usually undermine academic achievement and are often a negative byproduct of the competitiveness of performance goals (Urdan, 2004). If teachers or students put too much emphasis on being the best in the class, then some students decide that success is undesirable or beyond their reach. The alternative of simply avoiding failure may seem wiser as well as more feasible. Once a student adopts this attitude, they start to deliberately underachieve, doing only the minimum work necessary to avoid looking foolish or have serious conflict with the teacher. Avoiding failure in this way is an example of self-handicapping—deliberate actions and choices that reduce the chances of success (Boruchovitch et al., 2022). Students may self-handicap by not working hard, procrastinating assignments, and setting goals that are unrealistically high (Boruchovitch et al., 2022; Urdan, 2004).