Abstract
Domains of motivation, learning and personality traits (MLP) have emerged as vital constructs in studies of academic performance. Although there are abundant studies on the relationships of the three aforementioned dimensions on performance, no systematic synthesis of the empirical literature has been done regarding how three determinants jointly influence academic performance. Random-effects meta-regression analysis with a restricted maximum likelihood estimator is applied to 54 papers with 344 estimates. Summarization of effect sizes reveal a mean effect size for the study of r=0.22. The forest plot suggests a significant amount of study heterogeneity. No evidence of significant publication bias is uncovered. The achieved results show the significance of MLP as associated variables and also on an individual basis and they can positively impact student’s academic performance. Other mediator variables, including income level, year, main methodology used, cohort gender, sample size, publication type and citations are found to be important variables in understating academic performance. Future work is needed to develop an integrated approach to examine educational objectives and explore the correlates of combined MLP and academic performance.
Highlights
Academic performance is the basic criterion used to assess students’ success in their studies, making it vital to understand the factors responsible for determining, predicting, mediating and causing variance in academic achievement (Ahmad & Bruinsma, 2006)
Personality psychology is the branch of psychology that described by a set of traits or fixed set of patterns of the thought patterns, feelings, and behaviours that make each individual unique (Feldt et al, 2010)
Boys tend to master learning goals with good understanding of what is learned in a better way with higher interest for challenge (Musa et al, 2016) than do girls. This is in contradiction with the traditionally held idea and intelligence from Western countries that females perform significantly better than males in English/language (Mars et al, 1983) and Dale (1969, 1974), which explains that mixed schools show a better correlation with academic performance
Summary
Academic performance is the basic criterion used to assess students’ success in their studies, making it vital to understand the factors responsible for determining, predicting, mediating and causing variance in academic achievement (Ahmad & Bruinsma, 2006). There seems to be general agreement among scholars as to what influences academic achievement, especially educational and personality psychology. Predictors of academic achievement rest on a variety of cognitive measures, intelligence and mental abilities and on the other one, non-cognitive variables like personality characteristics, socioeconomic status, etc. Educational psychology is the scientific field which draws on and combines numerous psychological and behavioural theories to improve the understanding of teaching as well as learning strategies. It is involved with the concepts of motivation, intelligence, memory, cognition, intellectual development, evaluation and assessment (Larson, 2009). Some complex and systematic overlapping between these educational and personality psychology dimensions is possible (Busato et al, 2000; Komarraju et al, 2011)
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