Abstract:

BACKGROUND
Schools, teachers and families, must provide an environment to inspire young curiosity and interest of learning, encourage the construction of a critical awareness of reality and provide positive feelings about themselves.

METHODS
This is a quantitative research, which intends to analyse the relationship between constructs like perceived learning, learning performance, student interest on course and self-esteem. Lisrel software was used to develop the Structured Equation Model of perceived learning determinants
For this we used a sample of 1986 high school students
The constructs addressed are measured through existing scales, which were used in prior educational studies and have been shown to exhibit sound psychometric properties. The items were designed to be answered by using a 5-point Likert-type scale, with 1 indicating strongly disagree and 5 indicating strongly agree.

SUBJECTS
In this study we analyse the academic achievement and the main factors that could influence it. Namely we intend to relate personal learning factors, environmental factors and interaction between students and other educational actors and its direct and indirect relationships with academic achievement. The sample includes 38, 5% male and 61,5% female students, with ages between 14 and 22 years old, of the different levels of secondary education; 78% of the students failed at least one time, 36% study less than an hour per day whereas 45% study one to two hours, and 8% study between three and five hours.

CONCLUSIONS
Self-esteem (Murasko, 2007), the feeling of school belonging (Goodenow, 1993), student to student interaction (Hay et al., 2004; Curran & Rosen, 2006) have emerged as the main dimensions of predicting the academic success of High School students.

Keywords:

Academic success, academic achievement, personal learning factors, school environmental factors.