I´M A DATA ANALYSIS REPEATER. IF I PERSIST, WILL MY ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE BE IMPROVED?

Knowing what aspects are involved in learning and high academic achievement in subjects that are, typically, linked with high levels of resitting students, have repeatedly guided our efforts. Thus, we take into consideration one aspects that have shown to be clearly related to academic achievement: the student’s strengths. From this perspective, results from studies such as the ones of Kifer (1975), Harris & King (1982), take you to consider the idea that high academic achievement can be influenced by positive personality characteristics. The authors of this work have found statistical significant relationships between academic achievement and perseverance (Jara, Herrero, Rosel & Pallarés, 2014), satisfaction with what they are studying, and difficulty expectations within the subject (Jara, Rosel, Herrero & Pallarés, 2012).

We consider a group of psychology students (N=102) taking the subject called “Data Analysis”. The design divided the students into one of the two conditions: student retaking the subject or not. We therefore had two experimental groups. This dichotomous variable joined to the strength of being perseverant (continuous variable), formed a factorial design with two independent variables (dichotomousXcontinuous) creating an “inter” design paying special attention not as much to the main effects but to the interaction effect (Ato, Vallejo, Palmer, 2013), from the perspective of regression with interaction effects (Rosel, Jara & Herrero, in press). This study does the analysis step by step, since the formation of the dummy variables to the explanation of how both groups work differently in relation to their academic achievement.

The results show a significant interaction within the predictive model that adequately explains and allows us to guide the students who retake the subject in relation to their level of perseverance in order to gain a successful academic achievement.