Effects of students attitude on their performance

In a developing country like Pakistan, education is considered most important factor in the advancement of a nation. The role of students in developing a country is huge. You can’t expect a country to develop if it doesn’t have literate people. These students who are studying would be working tomorrow. They would be working for the public, private sector etc. These students, if perform well, can serve as pillars, the country would be standing on in future. And there are several factors which, if identified can improve students performance. In my views among all factors, attitude has a powerful impact on student’s performance. As Winston Churchill quotes “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” Earl Nightingale said that a great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views about person, place, thing, or event-in brief attitudes are judgments. They develop on the ABC model (affect, behavior, and cognition). The behavioral intention is a verbal indication or typical behavioral tendency of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity that constitutes an individual’s beliefs about the object. Most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment. Students can increase their performance if they are told that their faulty or negative attitudes are influencing their GPAs badly.

The primary objective of this study is to prove to the less scoring students that they can increase their performance by changing their negative attitudes like their beliefs, behaviors or thinking. Most of the students that are unable to perform well thinks that it’s just the fault of their dumb minds but they do not consider their own attitudes that are significantly affecting their performance. My objective is to prove to them that bringing a change in their faulty attitudes can increase their performance, as those students who have positive attitudes are able to score high. In this way overall class will be performing better and this will *

HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT & THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

STUDENT’S PERFORMANCE:

Student’s performance or their success is greatly linked with their attitudes i.e their beliefs, feelings or behaviors. Harry F.Bank has quoted that for success, attitude is equally as important as ability. Funmi Wale-Adegbite has stressed more as he said that Success is 80% attitude and 20% aptitude. Sterling W. Sill said that everything depends on attitude. We get good grades or poor grades, it depends on our attitude. Thomas Jefferson say that Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.

H1= Student’s performance greatly depends upon attitude.

STUDENT’S ATTITUDE:

Attitude is Evaluative statements of judgment concerning objects, people or events. There are three components of attitude that are as follows:

Cognitive Attitude: The opinion or belief segment of an attitude

Effective Attitude: The emotional or feelings segment of an attitude

Behavioral Components: An intention to behave in a certain way towards someone or something.

Student’s performance is affected by all three components.

Belief segment of attitude influences student’s performance significantly as Michael Korda said “To succeed, we must first believe that we can.”

H2= There is positive and significant relationship between Cogniti0n, attitude and students performance

Emotions play an important part in our lives, and even more so in self-improvement. Often times, successful people are those who know how to take control of their emotions and use it to their benefit- Ethan Beh

H3= Affective component plays an important role in determining attitude and influences performance significantly.

“When you change your behavior, you change your performance.” Author Unknown, from by changing your thinking. Kirby, Winston et al. (2002) focused on student’s impatience (his time-discount behavior) that influences his own academic performance.

H-4= Attitude relies on behavioral segment as well.

MODEL:

Attitude

Student’s performance

Behavioral component

Affective component

Cognitive component

This model shows that attitude significantly effects performance. In this model student’s performance is an independent variable and attitude is a dependent variable. Whereas cognitive, affective and behavioral are the components of attitude.

METHODOLOGY:

SAMPLE:

As sample we had taken students of MBA 2nd and 3rd semester that are 90 in total. In order to fill questionnaires, Students were selected randomly. 25 questionnaires were made and all were utilized.

PREPARATION OF QUESTIONNAIRE:

Questionnaire comprised of thirteen questions in total. First question was regarding their performance i.e. GPA in previous semester. It had three options that are 2.5-3.0, 3.0-3.5, and 3.5-4.0. Rest twelve questions were regarding attitude i.e four questions from each component. Every question had three options yes, no and sometimes.

PROCEDURE:

After questionnaires were filled. We counted the no. of students choosing each option. We also counted the student falling in each category of performance. After it was done we made table showing overall calculations. We also calculated percentages regarding result of each question and also made pie charts for convenience purpose. The purpose of doing all this was to show that good performers have comparatively good attitudes and vice versa.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION:

Following is the result of first question that was meant to checkout student’s performance.

QUESTIONS

2.4-3.0

3.0-3.5

3.5-4.0

1.GPA in previous semester

11

9

5

*Q.2-Q.5, Q.6-Q.9, Q.10-Q.13

YES

NO

SOMETIMES

2.Do you feel good about your subjects?

60

30

10

3.Do you feel bad when your friend gets good marks?

40

52

8

4.Do you feel your teacher is competent?

68

20

12

5.Do you feel bored when your teacher delivers lecture?

52

33

15

6.Do you irritate your teacher intentionally by asking silly questions?

24

60

16

7.Do you dream during class?

48

45

7

8.Are you in a habit of producing different sounds during lecture?

52

32

16

9.Do you misbehave in class?

44

50

6

10.Do you perceive that teacher’s attention is directed towards specific students as favoritism or biasness?

44

40

16

11.Do you perceive that your subjects are challenging?

48

36

16

12.Do you feel your teacher deducts your marks intentionally?

24

64

12

13.Do you feel your outcome is less than the efforts you are putting in?

56

40

4

In beginning of questionnaire development, I set the performance standard. Students falling in GPA 3.0 were considered poor performers or weak students. Those between 3.0-3.5 were labeled good whereas above that GPA were categorized as brilliant students. As in fig. 1 the results showed that 44% students lie in weak category.36% are good students whereas only 20% are brilliant performers.

Fig.1

Now our intention was to check up the feelings or affective part of student’s attitude. So we asked them that do they like their subjects and the result is depicted as follows:

Fig.2:

We got a higher percentage of students who had a positive attitude towards their chosen subjects. But at the same time there were 30% students who had not actually liked there subjects. Means the problem with attitude of some students was that they didn’t feel good about their subjects. There can be many possible reasons to this. But overall affect it had was on their performance.

Our third question was directly looking up for sign of jealousy (a highly negative feeling) in students. It straightly asked them that do they feel jealous when any friend gets good marks and the results are shown through pie chart i.e.

Fig.3

The result clearly showed that there are a lot of jealous students in class. Jealousy is a form of negative attitude and is related to the feeling or affective segment. This was a big reason for a high percentage of low scoring students in class.

it is very important for a student to feel good about his/her teacher and feel that teacher is competent. But when they were asked about their feeling about competence of their professor, 40 percent felt that the teacher is incompetent. It’s a fairly high percentage. And clearly told the reason for bad performance of students in exams.

Results to the question that do they feel bored during lecture directly favored my hypothesis.

Next four questions were aimed at faulty attitudes regarding behaviors. By the results of our next question, we found out that student’s biggest problem lies with their behavior in class. It was because 60% students admitted that they irritate their teacher intentionally by asking silly questions.

We had observed that the backbenchers of our class produce different sounds during lecture in order to interrupt or tease the teacher. So we thought to include this question also. Surprisingly students were honest enough to admit that they are in habit of producing different sounds during lecture. 52% marked ‘yes’ to this question. Overall result to this question is shown in fig.

There were many i.e. 44% who even admitted that they misbehave in class. And the result was this:

Attitude’s major and equally important component is cognitive component. Here we included last four questions, which purely dealt with student’s believes or opinions. Our first question regarding cognition was that do they perceive that teacher favors specific students and the answer were:

Our thinking can affect our performance sign

-ANALYSIS

As it is clear from our results that the results show what was intended. The students who try and make progress in there studies with positive attitude are always successful while those who are negative in there behavior are more concerned about the negative outcomes which lead to there failure. The results of the questionnaire are also same as intended.

-OVERALL DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION:

-HYPOTHESIS WAS THIS

-MY RESULT WAS THIS

-COMPARE UR CONCLUSION WITH ANYONES

-RECOMMENDATIONS