Browsing by Author "Casanova, Joana"
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- Determinants of academic achievement from the middle to secondary school education: a systematic reviewPublication . Costa, Ana; Moreira, Diana; Casanova, Joana; Azevedo, Ângela; Gonçalves, Armanda; Oliveira, Íris; Azevedo, Raquel; Dias, Paulo C.Because it is crucial for psychosocial adjustment and lifelong learning, education is the most relevant tool for ensuring inclusion and reducing inequalities. Due to its relationship with positive outcomes, such as life satisfaction, mental health, job performance or SES, academic achievement is a significant phenomenon that impacts students, families, and educational institutions. The present study sought to contribute to the field by reviewing the literature on the determinants that influence the objective achievements of a typical population of middle- to high-school students. Based on the PRISMA statement, a search for related studies was performed in the WoS, EBSCO, and PubMed databases, and 771 studies published between 1930 and 2022 were identified. After screening based on the analysis of abstracts, 35 studies met the selection criteria. The Bronfenbrenner ecological model served as the theoretical rationale for organizing the studies’ findings. The results of this review highlight the following determinants of school achievement: (i) Personal factors—gender, personality traits, cognitive abilities and academic background, motivation and self-constructs, stress and problem-solving strategies, and substance use; (ii) Contextual microsystem factors—(a) Family—parental educational background; parenting practices and interactions; parental involvement and support; (b) School—school location; school conditions, responsiveness, and practices; (c) Peers—peer-group disagreement management. This systematic review updates the existing empirical evidence on this topic and highlights the complexity of the phenomenon of academic achievement.
- School motivation inventory: development of a short scale in the Portuguese educational contextPublication . Costa, Ana; Dias, Paulo C.; Azevedo, Ângela Sá; Oliveira, Íris; Gonçalves, Armanda; Casanova, JoanaThe present study focuses on the development of a short scale of The Facilitating Conditions Questionnaire adapted to the Portuguese secondary school. Based on the McInerney’s School Motivation Inventory (McInnerney et al., 1997), a short form of the instrument with 31 items assesses the following motivation facilitating conditions: valuing school (5 items), affect to school (3 items), influence of teachers (5), positive (6 items) and negative (5 items) parental influence and negative (4 items) and positive (4 items) peer influence (4 items). The sample included 605 students from the secondary school, aged between 14 and 18 years (M = 15.76, SD = 1.14), mostly female (58.7%), attending to different academic courses. Overall, the short version of instrument exhibited good psychometric qualities: good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = .85), the extraction of 7 factors through exploratory factor analysis that explain 55.1% of the total variance and the confirmation of this structure by confirmatory factor analysis with good fit indices (Ȥ2 / 384 = 1.79, CFI = .94, TLI = .93 and RMSEA = .05). The results indicated adequate correlations between the dimensions, with the strongest association between the positive parental influence and negative peer influence (r = -.53) and the lowest between positive peer influence and negative parental influence (r = -.19). The scale also revealed adequate construct validity with the General Achievement Goals Orientation Scale (McInnerney et al., 1997; adapted to the Portuguese context by Gomes et al., 2018), presenting the strongest association between the positive parental influence’s dimension and global motivation (r = .66) and general mastery (r =.66) and the lowest associations between the general social dimension and the valuing school (r =.15) and positive peer influence (r =.16) dimensions. These results support the psychometric qualities of the instrument, not excluding, however, the need to replicate this study in larger samples and in other contexts.