Academic failure has always been one of the most pressing problems in educational process at school. A reduction in academic achievement over the course of time implies both poor academic performance and school maladjustment sometimes leading to grade retention and even school dropout. In the long-term perspective it can become the major cause of low self-concept and self-esteem thus causing problems with social relationship and result in the lack of social cohesion, support and adaptivity and have negative effects on general public health and even criminality rate.
The problem itself can stem from a variety of cognitive and behavioral reasons, some of them lying outside the scope of psychology. These can be numerous problems associated with student’s health, nutrition, family environment and living standards, parenting styles, education level of parents, family cohesion, positive family discipline (which can be described in terms of inductive discipline, supervision, and penalties), missing lessons, considerable academic load, biased approach, no motivation to study and other reasons.
Alongside with the above mentioned there are also psychological reasons of academic failures that can be bound by individual psychological constitution, underdeveloped cognitive and conative abilities, immature analysis and synthesis skills and many others. In this article we are going to reflect upon the psychological reasons of academic failures among school children and ways to cope with them.
Academic underachievement can be observable in one or several school subjects. Students who tend to fail in several subjects usually demonstrate underdevelopment of basic cognitive functions because aptitude for learning is directly dependent on intellectual abilities with cogitation being the most important mental process and, along with sensory and perceptional processes, memory, concentration, cogitation and language behavior, it directly impacts academic success/failure. According to Z. I. Kalmykova aptitude for learning can be defined as perceptibility to acquire knowledge and learning activities and is considered to be a sustained personality trait [1].
The aptitude for learning can be measured by the amount of help necessary for a student from teacher’s side and ability to transfer knowledge and course of actions learnt to a similar task, as well as rapidity of knowledge acquisition and absence of fatigue in the process, flexibility of new working methods, lasting retention of the material learnt. Educational quotient takes into account such intellectual characteristics of a student as demand for assistance, time needed for application of the assimilation law, types of errors and their source analysis, amount of necessary exercise.
Along with the above mentioned some researchers lay emphasis on cogitation efficiency and rate, amount of material sufficient for solving the problem, number of steps taken for finding a solution independently and amount of assistance needed before the problem is solved, time spent, as well as ability for self-education, working capacity and stamina [2]. Equally important are adjustment to new conditions, motivation for doing optional and more difficult tasks, constancy to purpose and distraction tolerance, open-mindedness.
In measuring aptitude for learning T. N. Kulikova features 3 possible levels [3]:
1. Reproductive level (school students can make generalizations, go from simple conclusions to more complicated, master the material given in the text books without bringing in anything on their own, copy schoolwork with some elements of intuitiveness but without showing any personal attitude to the facts, try to find new knowledge, participate in problem solving but cannot deal with it on their own, show ability to work with several reference sources).
2. Productive level (school students realize their objectives and understand the problem to be solved, they plan content and structure of their activity and find new methods and best ways of solving problems, model line of reasoning, have skills of self-learning).
3. Creative level (school students have variety of skills, high capacity for work, need for mental work, show ability to structure the material and prove their point, to implement new knowledge into already formed system of knowledge and easily transfer written speech into oral, to generalize, draw conclusions, build associations, such students have extensive vocabulary).
So aptitude for learning being in strong correlation with academic success can be seen as ability to master new knowledge and skills, new forms of activities, educational among them and it can be revealed in variety of activities and school subjects.
Among psychological reasons of underachievement specialists usually name underdeveloped cognitive activity, reduced motivation and underdeveloped speech, auditory sense and vision. Underachievers are usually characterized by difficulties to teaching school goals. In attempt to overcome these difficulties researchers classified non-achieving students according to their personality traits, namely mental activity and personality orientation including attitude to the teacher. There are three types of underachievers: students with low quality of mental activity but with positive attitude to learning; students with high quality of mental activity but with negative attitude to learning; students with low quality of mental activity and with negative attitude to learning.
Students of the first type can be characterized by low aptitude for learning because of low cogitativity and can be divided into 2 subtypes. Students of the first subtype tend to compensate academic failure by practical activities which leaves a mark on the thinking process. Lack of abstract thinking couples with the tendency to specificate ways of solving the problem which helps to reach educational goals. Analytical thinking deficiency leads to problems with digesting material under study. Such school students are prone to avoid any difficulties in learning — they do not go deep into the tasks but try to copy off someone’s work or use various hacks and prompts. Students of this subtype tend to have limited knowledge about the world around and be oriented on one type of practical activity which usually determines their future profession and helps them to get some progress and make up for their academic failures. They are usually students with low aptitude for learning due to underdeveloped cogitation and often have inflated or low self-esteem.
As it has been already mentioned, the second type features students with high efficiency of mental activity coupled with negative attitude to learning. Their self-organization is highly dependent on whether they like the subject or not. Academic failure can possibly lead to forming negative character traits in them.
Students of this type also fall into 2 subtypes with the first one describing students who are inclined to compensate their academic underachievement by other intellectual activity apart from learning process and engage themselves in this activity in the future. Usually they do not demonstrate vast social motives.
School students of the second subtype are likely to balance their academic failure by joining and leading out-of-school communities often with unfavorable focus. Despite their high intellectual ability, they show negative social dimension, misconduct and have bad reputation with teachers.
Speaking about the third type of underachievers it can be said that they comprise characteristics notable for the first and the second types — low aptitude for learning and antisocial focus.
Modern approaches to the problem of academic failures consider the main steps to be prevention, intervention and remediation. Prevention, as it can be seen in its name, aims at stopping the failure before it occurs which is an ideal way of improving the situation and facilitating child’s development at the key development period. Intervention goes into operation when students start to fall behind the class. Remediation can be resorted to when students show profound skill deficit and academic failure. Prevention is logically seen as the most preferable solution as targeting early reading deficits, independent learning skills, and motivational problems from a developmental perspective are essential to the prevention of academic failure [4].
Looking at the problem of low academic success in terms of categorizing underachievers into three groups it can be noted that students of the first type are good at self-coordinating. Thus, they need some work aimed at adjusting their mental activities which slow up educational process such as failures to generalize or underdeveloped verbal reasoning by developing abilities to move from abstract ideas to more specific and vice versa, to practice building logical structure of discourse, contrastive analysis, to form positive educational motivation leading to active metal work, to encourage self-directed learning and set the right ways of academic work taking into consideration student’s personality. The second type students, being characteristic of attempts to avoid educational difficulties, need correction work in respect of their cogitation as well as morale building activities. They need fostering of their interest in learning, good teacher-student relationship and positive psychological atmosphere. Students of the third type need help in all directions simultaneously.
So it can be said that overcoming academic failure is one of the key tasks in pedagogical psychology. As aptitude for learning is inextricably linked to metacognitive skills (cognitive processes management — planning and self-management, voluntary attention, arbitrary memory, communication skills, abilities to use various types of semiotic systems), the above skills should be attended to at certain sensitive development periods in particular.
References:
- Kalmy`kova Z. I. Obuchaemost` i principy` postroeniya metodov ee diagnostiki // V kn.: Z. I. Kalmy`kova (Red.) Problemy` diagnostiki umstvennogo razvitiya uchashhixsya. M., 2005.
- Kalmy`kova, A. K. Markova cit. po Zimnyaya I. A. Pedagogicheskaya psixologiya. -- Rostov-na-Donu:Feniks,1997.-480s.
- Kulikova T. N. Diagnosticheskie issledovaniya urovnya obuchaemosti shkol`nikov // Internet i obrazovanie. 2008. № 1.
- Mary, A. R. Prevention of Academic Failure / A. R. Mary. — Tekst: e`lektronny`j // https://www.sciencedirect.com: [sajt]. — URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B0126574103007571 (data obrashheniya: 04.12.2023).
