Essay Sample on Factors Affecting a Student's Academic Performance

A student can perform well or poorly in his academics. Various factors contribute to the performance of a student. This essay will mainly discuss the factors that will make a student improve his results to a better grade or make him not achieve good results as expected. Some of the factors that can influence a students performance can be psychological factors, the socio-economic factors or environmental factors.

Firstly the social and economic factors can have a great impact on a students performance. This refers to the background in which a student has been raised. Some people are from poor backgrounds while others are from a wealthy background. Students who are from a poor background tend to gain and understand the academic skills more slowly as compared to the students from a well-off family. A child who is from a wealthy family may have a lot of resources to use to boost his academic grades such as books or even private tutors, and this will help in improving his grade. On the other hand, a student from a low-income family lack the necessary resources or even basic needs; this makes his learning environment not friendly which lead to the student performing poorly. Also, a students performance will be affected by the level of education that their parents have. Parents who are literate will help their children to solve academic problems and can act as their personal tutors while at home this will assist in boosting the students performance (Milner & Howard, 2015).

Secondly, a students performance will be affected by psychological factors. It refers to one's feeling or thoughts of a person that will, in turn, change his attitude towards learning. This could be caused by the health condition of a person, self-esteem and ones social behavior. An individual who is sick will tend to have a low level of remembering what he learns or taught and this will result in the poor performance. Students who have a high degree of self-esteem will tend to do well in their academics this is because they are confidence in whatever they do. Students suffering from low self-esteem are shy and are unable to express themselves or even find it hard socializing with others and hence cannot learn new ideas from other people. This will cause such a student to have a poor grade (Gargiulo, 2015).

The last factor that influences the performance of a student is the environment that surrounds the student. It could be contributed by the location of the institution of learning. Areas, where the temperatures are high or experience heavy flooding during rainy season, will be unfavorable for the student. Most modern schools fit their classrooms with air conditioners so as to create the right temperature which is good for a learning environment. It will contribute to the poor academic performance as this will lower the level of concentration of a student (Prager, 2010). Schools which are situated in the urban area hire professional teachers unlike those in the countryside which most of them are the public schools. This will affect the results of a student this is because a professional will be able to identify when the student dont understand and use other techniques to improve his level of understanding.

In conclusion, a students performance can be enhanced by making sure that his learning environment is in good condition, encouraging and motivating through rewarding the small achievements that he/she makes so as to be able to improve his self-esteem and his attitude towards learning. Parents and as well as the entire community has the responsibility to ensure that these factors that affect the performance of the student are eliminated, and through good performance, the future of the student will be better.

References

Gargiulo, R. M. (2015). Special education in contemporary society: An introduction to exceptionality. London: SAGE Publications.

Milner, H. R., & Howard, T. C. (2015). Race in class: Confronting poverty and race in schools and classrooms.

Prager, E. K. (2010). An Evaluation of Factors Affecting Student Performance on Broad Measures of Student Learning.