Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to analyse differences in academic performance between Spanish students of Compulsory Secondary Education with and without social anxiety. The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI; Turner, Beidel, Dancu and Stanley, 1989) were administered to a sample of 1657 Spanish students (865 boys and 792 girls) in Grades 7 (n = 511), 8 (n = 397), 9 (n = 402) and 10 (n = 347). Age ranged from 12 to 16 (M = 13.81; SD = 1.35).
The SPAI is a self-report inventory consisting of 45 items designed to assess cognitive, physiological, and behavioral symptoms of social anxiety and agoraphobia, with two subscales. The Social Phobia subscale contains 32 items, 17 of which measure social anxiety in four contexts: in the presence of strangers, authority figures, people of the opposite sex, and people in general. In the present study we only used the Social Phobia subscale. Each item is rated on a 7-point scale (1 = never; 7 = always).
The academic achievement was measured with grade point average (GPA), school records in Spanish, Math and English and failed subjects for each student in academic year.
The t and Z test analyses were used to determine if there were differences between social anxious and non-social anxious students in the academic achievement and failed subjects. The effect size (d index; Cohen, 1988) was used to set the magnitude of these differences.
Results indicated that students with social anxiety obtain significantly lower GPA and lower grades in English subject than students without social anxiety. Furthermore, the proportion of students with one or two failed subjects is significantly higher in the students of social anxiety group than in the students of non-social anxiety group. The effect sizes of all differences were of small magnitude.
In conclusion, results support existence of differences in achievement performance between students with and without social anxiety. These findings suggest that social anxious adolescents may be students who achieve below their potential. Future research should examine psycho-socio-educational factors that could contribute to scholar failure, as a motivation, attributional style, self-efficacy and social status, and analyse their possible involvement in the early drop out of school system of these students.

Keywords:

Adolescence, social anxiety, academic achievement.