Correlations of self-esteem with academic competencies and gender variations

Abstract

The goal of this study is to assess, with validated instruments, the corollary links between students’ academic results and the nature of their perceptions of their skills and self-esteem. For accomplishing this, we tested it 255 student volunteers with an average age of 21 years (91 female students and 164 male students). We opted for two types of surveys: a questionnaire developed by Duclos, which measures self-esteem in five domains, and a questionnaire on the perception of competence on three domains of training (oral skills, written skills and physical practice skills). Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) was used to assess the intensity of the relationship between parameters. The data were processed with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (version 26). The significance level was set at p < 0.05. These three variables combined in the synthesis of the results confirm the initial hypothesis that there is a correlation but only between a few domains of self-esteem, sense of competence and academic results obtained. Indeed, students in this branch of education have a negative perception of their ‘academic’ and ‘physical’ self-esteem when their academic performance is modest or low. On the other hand, the domains of family, social and overall self-esteem are not influenced, despite modest academic achievement. The result is that even though students display a low sense of competence in the face of modest results during training, their self-esteem in the ‘family and social’ domains stays stable with good scores.

Keywords: Academic results, corollary links, gender, perception of competence, self-esteem.