Helping teens to feel competent and purposeful – and not just happy – can have a positive impact on their grades, according to a new study.
Encouraging qualities such as self-awareness, confidence and a sense of meaning and purpose can make as much as two grades difference, academics at Cambridge University found.
The results suggest that schools should switch the focus of well-being work away from promoting life satisfaction, or happiness, which was found to have no impact on academic performance, and towards what is known as ‘eudaimonia’, or how well a person is functioning.
Eudaimonia includes feelings of competence, motivation and self-esteem, and is distinct from how happy a person feels.
Students with high levels of eudaimonia consistently outperformed their peers in GCSE assessments – taken at age 15 and 16 – particularly in math, according to the study of more than 600 adolescents at schools in England.
Teenagers who received the top grades had levels of eudaimonia one-and-a-half times those who received the lowest grades, on average.
This relationship held even when researchers accounted for factors such as family background.
In contrast, researchers found no link between grades and life satisfaction, according to the study, published in the journal School Psychology Review.
Well-being work in schools, however, tends to focus on life satisfaction, at least in England, with ‘happiness’ recently added to guidance for teaching relationships, sex and health education.
But these findings suggest efforts would be better redirected towards cultivating personal values and goals and a sense of self-worth, says Dr Tania Clarke, lead author of the study and formerly a researcher at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education.
“Well-being education often focuses on teaching students about being happy and not being sad.” Clarke says. “That is over-simplistic and overlooks other vital qualities of well-being that are particularly salient during the formative period of adolescence.
“Adolescents also need to develop self-awareness, confidence, and ideally a sense of meaning and purpose.”
GCSEs are graded from 1 – the lowest – to 9, and students who are getting a grade 3 or 4 in their math could rise a couple of grades if schools emphasized these qualities, rather than just promoting positivity and minimizing negative emotions, Dr Clarke adds.
Teenagers taking part in the study completed an assessment designed to measure both life satisfaction and eudaimonia, with the results then compared with scores in mock English and math GCSEs.
Students who achieved grades 8 and 9 in math had an average well-being score nine points higher (out of 50) than those awarded a grade 1, and three to four points higher than the average across the cohort.
Separating well-being into life satisfaction and eudaimonia found a positive relationship with grades for eudaimonia but not for life satisfaction.
The average eudaimonia score for grade 9 students was 17.3 out of 25, while for grade 1 students it was 10.9 out of 25.
Even when researchers accounted for potentially confounding factors, such as the school attended, the student’s gender and socio-economic status and level of special educational needs, they still saw the correlation between eudaimonia and grades.
Researchers also looked at whether students exhibited a ‘growth mindset’, a belief in their capacity to improve which has been another focus for efforts to promote well-being in schools.
Students with a high eudaimonia score also tended to show a growth mindset, although the growth mindset did not itself predict better grades.
This suggests that eudaimonia has wider mental health benefits, providing a foundation for self-belief, as well as supporting higher attainment, the researchers say.
Interviews with some of the students who took part in the research – published in a separate study earlier this year – highlighted concerns over the impact of high-stakes testing on student well-being.
Students associated doing well with getting good grades, rather than with meeting their own goals, and this could hinder schools’ efforts to promote well-being, Clarke says.
Instead, students should be encouraged to understand their progress in terms of their personal motivation, strengths and values, she adds.
“There is a link between better well-being and a more nuanced understanding of academic success,” Clarke says. “Because schools are under heavy pressure to deliver academic results, at the moment students seem to be measuring themselves against the exam system, rather than in terms of who they want to be or what they want to achieve.”
“Well-being education needs to move beyond notions of ‘boosting’ happiness towards deeper engagement, helping adolescents to realize their unique talents and aspirations, and a sense of what happiness means for them, personally,” adds Dr Ros McLellan, from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study.
“This would not just improve well-being: it is also likely to mean better exam results, and perhaps fewer issues for students later on.”
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