THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIOMETRIC STATUS OF STUDENTS ON ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Abstract

The mission, desire and preoccupation of each teacher are or should be to ensure academic achievement for each student, by mobilizing all necessary resources. We observe the academic achievement through a variety of educational finalities, and involving socio-affective and personality dimensions indispensable for an effective functioning of the individual within the community. The objective of the research is to underline the influence of the sociometric status of students upon academic achievement. We formulated the hypotheses that positive sociometric status is associated with academic achievement, while negative sociometric status is associated with academic failure. In order to assess them, we applied a three-item sociometric test, and we elaborated the sociomatrices and the sociograms for each group/class in order to extract the annual qualifications for the students within the investigated sample from class registers; afterwards, we carried out the statistical analysis of the data. The findings partially confirm the working hypotheses. Overall, we found a significant relation between the sociometric status of students and academic achievement. A difference was found between students with a positive status and those with zero sociometric status, from the perspective of academic achievement. The investigation revealed that the gender variable has no significant influence on the degree of the relation between sociometric status and academic achievement; while the degree / the stage of schooling variable has a moderating role.

Keywords

• academic achievement
• sociometric test
• sociometric status