THE CONCEPT OF ACADEMIC SUCCESS OF HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Abstract

The concept of academic performance plays a key role in the development of future professionals and is also an important indicator in psychological research. However, this concept does not have a clear unambiguous interpretation in the scientific or regulatory literature, so it requires terminological clarification.

The aim of the paper is to explicate the concept of academic success of higher education students in the context of psychological research. To achieve this goal, the authors use a number of theoretical methods, such as methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, classification, as well as metaphysical and hermeneutical methods.

The first ‘external’ approach considers academic success as the degree of mastery of the amount of knowledge, skills, abilities established by higher education standards in terms of their meaningfulness, completeness, depth, strength and is expressed in grades. However, the focus on grades and GPAs does not always accurately reflect academic achievement or cognitive development. In addition, a narrow interpretation of success often does not take into account the subjective perception of success by students themselves. Therefore, it is quite reasonable to take into account the second ‒ ‘internal’ approach to understanding academic success, which can be called ‘psychological’.

The understanding of success in education is multifaceted and includes both external recognition and internal satisfaction. From the psychological point of view, the concept of success includes the process of achieving significant goals, the result of their achievement, as well as subjective satisfaction with the process and results of activity. Accordingly, the criteria of academic success in higher education institutions are not only the effectiveness of learning, which is expressed in the grades of academic performance, but also the satisfaction and motivation of students to acquire knowledge, skills and abilities. The analysis made it possible to identify academic performance as a component of the broader phenomenon of academic performance, which in further research should be used both in the direct ‘external’ meaning of the grade point average and in the ‘internal’ meaning of finding its psychological factors.