Self-esteem and Academic Performance
Table of Contents
Both self-esteem and self-concept have been argued for a long time to boost the learners’ academic achievement. This is because the drive to achieve anything in life, purely depends on how one positions themselves in that quest. To that effect, we assert that these two components of our personality are crucial elements for any goal that we strive to achieve.
It is actually in that regard, that an American Psychologist Abraham Maslow included self-esteem in his hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow, without the fulfillment of the self-esteem need, individuals will strive to seek it and will be unable to grow to their fullest potential. Similarly Carl Rogers, the greatest Humanistic Psychologist suggests that many people fail to reach their full potential because they consider themselves to be invaluable and unworthy of love. Let us take a look at how they develop and how they relate to the academic achievement.
Self- concept refers to the individuals’ knowledge and beliefs about themselves as result of their experiences. It usually develops and through varies with reinforcements and evaluations by significant others. It a conscious judgement regarding the significance of oneself. Hence, self- concept is the person’s perception of competence or adequacy in academic and non-academic domains.
We can define self-esteem as an individual’s evaluations about themselves, in short, their self-image. It is an effective reaction or an overall judgement of self-worth. Furthermore, self-esteem is a product of self-concept based on the fact that it incorporates the self-concepts in all the areas of one’s life. Thus, self-esteem can be high or low depending on the perception that one has about himself or herself.
The major sources of self-esteem and self-concept development are the experiences in a person’s life. These experiences include both positive and negative life experiences. Positive life experiences result in positive feelings of self-worth and confidence to deal with life’s challenges.
On the other hand, the negative life experiences create negative feelings of self-worth. It is worth noting that parents play a major role in shaping the self-concept of their children as they are the main sources of positive or negative experiences a child will have in the early years of life.
The experiences related to the development of these two aspects of personality, self-esteem and self-concept, could be both in terms of inborn characteristics such as tendencies towards being reserved, tough minded and self-sufficient. These aspects make one to interpret and react to life situations in a certain way, in terms of the impact of external events in the parenting style.
Erik Erikson’s stages of personality development also point out that personality comes as a result of the interaction of internal psychological factors and the external social factors. Therefore, unconditional love and care given by parents translate into later effects of self-esteem as the child grows older.
The self-esteem and self-concept for academic achievement has been a topic of debate for quite some time. Different studies have identified academic achievement as an important determinant of self-esteem. Erickson (1968) identified academic achievement as a vital component of forming a healthy self-image. High academic achievement results in high self-esteem and vice versa.
Moreover, during adolescence, the physical appearance also plays an important role in the development of the self-esteem and self-concept. This is so because, during this stage the body goes through a lot of changes due to puberty. For instance, some teenagers develop a lot of pimples while others put on a lot of weight. Such change does not sound well to their feeling and can cause them to develop a negative self- image and consequently, a negative self-esteem especially, if they are sensitive to other people’s comments like, “There are too many pimples on your face”: ‘’ You are too fat’’.
In addition to that, it is at this stage that adolescents compare themselves with some celebrities and other media images. The way people compare themselves with others, can affect the way they feel about themselves and this is very serious, when it comes to women who usually have their worth judged on their physical appearance. The research by Horton (2007) confirmed, by further emphasizing that attractive women had a higher self-esteem and high-quality interactions than less attractive women.
Social comparison is another factor which contributes to the development of self-esteem in individuals. Many people evaluate their intelligence, creativity or success in life in relation to others. The performance of people to which an individual compares oneself can have an influence on ones self-esteem. For instance, if making cakes is very important to an individual, knowing that there is someone within the social group who makes better cakes can lower their self-esteem.
Another factor that contributes to the development of self-esteem and self-concept is culture. In many individualistic cultures such as western cultures people are encouraged to stand up for themselves in order to get what they want. A research finding by Bernstein et al (2008), revealed that the society in North American encourages children to feel special, to want self-esteem and feel good about themselves because these characteristics are associated with happiness, popularity and superior performance in school.
The western cultures, to that effect, perceive a sense of independence, uniqueness and self-esteem as fundamental to mental health. Collectivist cultures such as the Zambian culture do not value a strong sense of self-worth. This is because children are encouraged to work with their family members or small work groups in order to advance the welfare of their family.
In China and Japan like in most of Eastern part of the world on the other hand, children are encouraged to live in harmony with others and not to stand out from the crowd because doing so might make others feel inferior. In collectivist cultures in general, life satisfaction is associated with social approval and living in harmony with others. However, there are gender differences in the development of self-esteem in both individualistic and collectivist cultures.
Scientific studies have shown that most women tend to achieve their self-concept and self-esteem from attachment to others. For instance, some married women achieve their self-esteem through their husbands. In most of African cultures, the traditions that did not allow women to speak out in the presence of men have contributed highly to women having a low self-esteem in the recent past. But what are the characteristics of self-esteemed people?
A person with a high self-esteem will show the following signs;
Low self-esteem keeps people from realizing their full potential. A person with low self-esteem feels unworthy, incapable and incompetent. A person with low self-esteem will show the following signs;
People develop their self-esteem and self-concept by interacting with the significant others and how the significant others react to one’s situation such as criticizing or giving one confidence. The research has also ascertained that both self-concept and self-esteem have a conspicuous bearing on academic achievement.
This means that a students’ academic achievement greatly depends on how they feel about themselves as well as the way the know themselves and digest their own capacity. This will act as a driving force to make someone to work hard and maintain the prescribed status. For example, if an individual rates herself as a high achiever, this will be a challenge to such a person to work hard in every assignment so as to maintain this status.
In addition to that, self-esteem and self-concept affect how people think and how they relate to other people. Learners with low self-concept or low self-esteem are likely to lack confidence, which translates into having negative thoughts towards their academic work. Such learners are also likely to give up so easily rather than facing the challenging subjects head-on, because they expect to fail everything they try.
For instance, there is this tendency in many learners to have some negative perceptions towards mathematics and science related subjects. As a result, you will notice that most of the learners perform poorly in these subjects. However, at times poor performance can be explained by different factors, such as study techniques as well as many more that we shall detail in the near future.
We can conclude that self-concept is a belief about who we are, while self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves. The factors that contribute to the development of self-concept and self-esteem include parenting styles, academic achievement and other social experiences. Lastly, we can affirm that the effect of self-esteem and self-concept for academic achievement has been proven to be a fact, not only among young ones, but also adults. This means that the status one has built about themselves determines the force for achievement.
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