Fear of academic failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Abstract

A successful transition into Higher Education is influenced by a number of different factors. This chapter focuses upon the personal category which, among other things, includes students’ coping behaviour under pressure and their negotiation of failure. We examine whether students’ individual level of motivation, fear of failure, enjoyment and self-efficacy, assessed before the beginning of their studies, influences their probability of academic success at the end of the first year. Using a logistic regression we found out, that fear of failure have a significant moderate effect on study success and therefore may become a self-fulfilling-prophecy.