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Publication on students’ achievement in higher education in the PLOS ONE international journal

Jordi Colomer, together with other researchers from de the Departments of Economics and of Specific Didactics of the University of Girona, publishes the scientific paper entitled “Teachers’ involvement and students’ self-efficacy: Keys to achievement in higher education” in the international PLOS ONE journal, with the support of the Teaching Innovation Network on Reflective Learning and Josep Pallach Institute of Education Sciences (ICE).

Jordi Colomer, together with other researchers from de the Department of Economics and the Department of Specific Didactics of the University of Girona, publishes the scientific paper entitled “Teachers’ involvement and students’ self-efficacy: Keys to achievement in higher education” in the international PLOS ONE journal.

The authors study the relative importance of the three dimensions of need-supportive teaching (NST) and students’ self-efficacy to gain new knowledge about students’ achievement in higher education. NST assumes that teachers are key to the motivation of students, providing autonomy support, structure (support of competence), and involvement (support of relatedness). In turn, self-efficacy raises students’ confidence in their ability to succeed in academic tasks.

The data used for the empirical analysis consist of the whole universe of teaching evaluations by students at the University of Girona over three consecutive years. In total, the authors were provided with 86,038 complete students’ records: 27,216 for 2014; 29,946 for 2015; and 28,876 for 2016. The available data provide information on 2,204 different course subjects over the period of analysis. In all, 1,832 teachers were evaluated. The teacher-evaluation questionnaire consists of a six questions focused on: structure, referred to the amount and the clarity of the information that teachers provide to students about what is expected and how they can realize those expectations; autonomy support as students find themselves more engaged in the process of learning when teachers foster relevance by identifying the value of tasks, lessons, materials, and activities; teachers’ involvement and on the extent to which teachers are available to all students and committed to their learning; and students’ self-efficacy, or students’ feelings of competence in relation to their cognitive judgment of their personal capacity to learn.

The study evidence that teachers’ involvement and students’ self-efficacy are the two elements most strongly and positively related to achievement. Students obtain higher marks when they believe that their teachers are dependable and available to offer resources, and when they feel capable of organizing and implementing the courses of action necessary to acquire knowledge. The authors also find that students’ experience of autonomy support and structure are negatively (or not) correlated with achievement. Results from linear regression models with fixed effects (by subject, year, and lecturer) on achievement show that students have different needs in the following knowledge areas: humanities, social sciences, sciences, life sciences, medical sciences and architecture/engineering. Multiple factors can explain why university students from different knowledge areas show different needs-factors such as individual abilities, intelligence, personal aptitude, interests, background, or the values that make up their belief system and personality. Among humanities students, for example, achievement is correlated with autonomy support and involvement; among those in architecture and engineering, the correlation is with structure and involvement; among those in social and medical sciences, it is with involvement; and among those studying life sciences and sciences there is no correlation with any of the NST dimensions. Thus, since students from different areas of knowledge present different psychological needs in relation to achievement, an in-depth study of these needs would result in strategies that can be used to plan and manage university teaching in the different areas of knowledge, if the objective is to provide more-effective teaching. In addition, psychological needs should also be known and aligned with students’ individual profiles, in order to gain knowledge of the interrelationships between university students’ belief systems and their interpersonal influences.

Microdata from the teaching evaluation questionnaires as well as the information on students’ records were made available to us by the University of Girona (Planning and Evaluation Cabinet) in a fully anonymized format therefore the data for this study were analysed anonymously.

The Teaching Innovation Network on Reflective Learning and the Josep Pallach Institute of Education Sciences (ICE) at the University of Girona both provided support to pay for the publication fees.

This study has been conducted within the “Dissemination and Innovation in the Teaching of Physics” research line of the Environmental Physics group.

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