Personal and Social-Contextual Factors in K–12 Academic Performance: An Integrative Perspective on Student Learning

Abstract

Our extensive literature review in the fields of educational, social, and cognitive psychology has led us to identify about a dozen variables that demonstrate direct empirical links to academic achievement at the K–12 level. Those variables are grouped into four major categories: student engagement, learning strategies, school climate, and social-familial influences. We then categorize the first two variables as personal factors and the latter two as social-contextual factors. We document empirical findings that have shown particular relationships between the reviewed personal and social-contextual factors and academic achievement, mainly in the areas of reading and mathematics. Based on our conceptualization, we propose an integrated perspective that students’ personal factors in the domains of behavior, affect, attitude, and cognition as well as their social-contextual environment have to work in concert to produce optimal school performance. We conclude with a discussion on educational implications and future research to be addressed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Nathan Kogan at Educational Testing Service for his comments on an earlier draft of this article. We are also very grateful for the editorial comments from anonymous reviewers.

Jihyun Lee is now at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Notes

¹We acknowledge that homework completion conceptually belongs to both student engagement and learning strategy categories. One can argue that completing homework is an important indicator of student engagement especially for younger students. Our categorization of this variable is based on a practical issue—whether we promote homework completion as an indicator of engagement or as a learning strategy. Because we believe homework completion as a strategy has more practical importance than as an engagement variable, we include this variable under the learning strategy category in our article.

²We acknowledge that it is also likely to observe reverse directional influences—from students’ achievement to personal and social-contextual factors. For instance, students’ improved achievement could lead to heightened engagement and affect parental involvement in their child's learning. However, we use a directional link to present our case of identifying factors impacting student achievement. We do not intend to imply causality in our framework.