Grade, Self-esteem, and others

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Modern education had highlighted self-esteem as a significant factor which contributes to academic performance improvement (Booth & Gerard, 2011); however, contemporary education instructors have suggested that though self-esteem is not the only factor contributing to academic performance, but also other factors have more significant impacts on academic achievement.  For instance, there was a study which investigated the correlation among self-esteem and academic performance based on the assumption that self-esteem encourages student involvement in learning procedure (Lane, Lane & Kyprianou, 2004).  However, Moore (1993) indicated that self-efficacy is not the only factor which improves academic performance base on the math score comparison of Korea students and the United States Students in his article, Grade and Self-Esteem.  Moore argued that to encourage students' academic motivation to achieve superior academic performance, students should have both self-esteem and higher standard.  It is evident that self-esteem contributes to motivating the student and leading enhancement in academic achievement partially.  However, the academic standards for the students should not be higher than achievable level and to investigate and achieve the proper standards, metacognition and self-regulation competencies are helpful.

            Though it is obvious that learning aim stimulates that the desire of achievement, unrealistic higher standards which exceed students' capacity cause study burnout and even deteriorate academic performance.   Taing (2013) insisted that goal setting in education can improve performance by increasing the commitment level.  However, he argued that the goal should be intrinsic and achievable.  His statement implies unreasonable expectation from external and internal forces can even discourage the motivation and impede academic achievement.  Chang's study (2015) denotes this study-burnout phenomenon through the case of Korean students forced by social-perfectionism.  He insisted that self and socially oriented perfectionisms which require higher expectation than actual status result in study-burnout.  Thus, to motive students' involvement and enhance academic achievement, the instructor should provide a proper standard, which is achievable by the students, and guide them to establish appropriate objectives autonomously. 

To establish a reasonable academic goal, educators should educate students’ competence to understand themselves objectively and encourage further development.  Parvinder, Sarita, and Deepika (2018) emphasized a metacognition learning method to set proper standards for learners.  It is true that every student has different learning phase and method and if it is possible to customize education per students, there would be overall grade-enhancements among learners.  However, due to practical limitations like labors, capital, and time, it is impractical to provide individualized teaching with limited instructors, and this limited customize-education can cause a knowledge gap and ambiguous unintegrated curriculum.  Thus, numerous educators attend to introducing metacognition learning into the current education system as a method to cultivate students independent learning abilities.  As this metacognition learning method provides problem-solving strategies based on self-feedback by internalizing self-conception, educators expect that it could supplement the limitation of current individualized education. 

Though it is important to realize strength and weakness of oneself to establish strategies to develop oneself, understanding oneself is not the end of learning but efforts to achieve the goal based on self-regulation competencies are prerequisite to enhance academic performance.  Even students realize their academic status, their distorted self-esteems that believe they can achieve their goal whenever they want, impede the academic performance, and generate students who postpone their study plans to enjoy immediate entertainments.   Contemporary experiment examined the relation between self-regulation and academic performance revealed that students who have more self-regulation ability have better academic performances.  Moreover, it indicates that self-regulation learning has positive influences on self-efficacy based on executive competence and motivation of students (Mirhosseini, Lavasani, & Hejazi, 2018).

            It is evident that self-esteem is the factor which assists students not to lose their motivation, however, as Moore insisted, self-esteem is not the only factor determines the grade but motivation to study is the prerequisite.  Instead, self-esteem and proper learning objective encourage learners' motivation.  Therefore, this motivation performs a significant role to improve academic competences.  Educators who must struggle to motivate students and aid them to improve their grade should consider the way to motivate them and suggest practical methods to achieve improved academic performance.  Thus, enhancing students’ motivation through cultivating metacognition competence is an alternative of current education which could guide students to set appropriate learning objective with not hampering students’ self-esteem.  Also, metacognition should accompany self-regulation to fulfill the standard by investing more efforts.

 

References
Booth, M. Z., & Gerard, J. M. (2011).  Self-esteem and academic achievement: a comparative study of adolescent students in England and the United States.  Compare, 41(5), 629-648.
Chang, E., Lee, A., Byeon, E., & Lee, S. (2015).  Role of motivation in the relation between perfectionism and academic burnout in Korean students.  Personality and Individual Differences, 82, 221-226.  doi: 10.3897/bdj.4.e7720.figure2f
Taing, M. U., Smith, T., Singla, N., Johnson, R. E. and Chang, C. (2013), Goal orientation and goal setting.  J Appl Soc Psychol, 43: 1668-1675.  doi:10.1111/jasp.12119
Lane, J., Lane, A. M., & Kyprianou, A. (2004).  Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Their Impact on Academic Performance.  Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 32(3), 247–256, https://doi-org.libproxy.unl.edu/10.2224/sbp.2004.32.3.247 Mirhosseini, F. S., Lavasani, M. G., & Hejazi, E. (2018).  The effectiveness of self-regulation learning skills on motivational and academic variables among students.  Middle East Journal of Family Medicine, 16(5), 68–75.  https://doi-org.libproxy.unl.edu/10.5742/MEWFM.2018.93385  
Moore, R. (1993).  Grades and Self-Esteem.  Guidelines: A cross-cultural reading/writing text.  Spack.  R (Ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  (Original work published 1976) p.p. 117-120
Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., Gerhart, B. A., & Wright, P. M. (2017).  Fundamentals of human resource management.  New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Taing, M. U., Smith, T., Singla, N., Johnson, R. E. and Chang, C. (2013), Goal orientation and goal setting.  J Appl Soc Psychol, 43: 1668-1675.  doi:10.1111/jasp.1211