Abstract
The main purpose of this study is to examine the possible relationships between academic locus of control, positive thinking skills and grit in high school students. The participants of the research are composed of 288 adolescents continuing their high school education from 4 different schools in Agri, Turkey which were selected with convenient sampling. 168 of the participants are male and 120 are female students. Pearson's moment correlation analysis was used for determining relations among variables, and multiple regression analysis was used to determine the regression coefficient of the variables on each other. Parametric tests were used, because the data showed a normal distribution. p <.01 significance level criteria were taken. According to the findings, positive correlation between internal academic locus of control and positive thinking skills was found (r=.54). A positive correlation was found between the internal academic locus of control and grit at (r=.58). A positive correlation was found between positive thinking skills and grit (r=.61). The internal academic locus of control, external academic locus of control and positive thinking skills explain the 50% of the grit's total variance. Based on this evidence, it can be said that the academic locus of control and positive thinking skills are important predictors for grit.
Highlights
Because the concept of positive thinking skills has been theorized to have possible effects on academic achievement and educational psychology, we aimed to test whether it would mediate the association between academic locus of control and grit
There is a statistically significant relationship between the academic locus of control and the positive thinking skills according to the study findings
The positive thinking skills increase as the internal academic locus of control score increases and the positive thinking skills decrease as the external academic locus of control score increases
Summary
Turkey’s average scores of mathematics and science literacy were below the average of OECD countries in PISA 2015 data [12, 13]; even took the last places among the European countries The impact of these external factors on academic achievement is undeniable, but the effects of the internal factors cannot be ignored. The increase in the education expenditures among the OECD countries over the years [14] is not as bad as the PISA ranking These differences between the success scores of local exam results (TEOG, YGS and LYS) and PISA achievement values reveal that the internal factors should be invested as well as the investments made to the external factors. 3 internal factors, which have a direct relation with the academic achievement, were considered as the academic locus of control [15, 16], positive thinking skills [1, 2, 17, 18, 19] and the grit [10, 20]
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