The determinants of academic performance: evidence from a Cambodian University

ABSTRACT

Internationally, there has been considerable literature on the predictors of academic performance in higher education. However, the empirical findings are still limited in Cambodia; therefore, this paper was conducted to examine the determinants of academic performance of 329 undergraduate students selected from a university in Cambodia. Based on the findings from the multivariate regression analysis, a number of variables, namely high school grade, English ability, class attendance, study effort, academic self-efficacy, and family socio-economic status were found to be positively associated with academic performance. Term-time employment and family size had an adverse impact on academic performance. However, there was no sufficient evidence to indicate age, gender, household location, parental education, parental involvement, and teaching evaluation to have predictive power on academic performance. Hence, the study concluded that the personal backgrounds played the potential role in predicting academic performance of undergraduate students.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic performance
• Cambodian higher education
• family factors
• personal factors
• school factors

Acknowledgements

First of all, the author would like to thank the editor and the reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions to improve this paper. Aside from this, the author thanks the participants in the selected university’s meeting to discuss the findings of this paper and for their valuable comments to improve the paper. However, all the views and the remaining errors belong to the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.