Understanding the Impact of Students' Psychological Dispositions and Behavior on Student Exam Performance in an Undergraduate Business Statistics Course

Abstract

Research on K-12 and college students has shown that both cognitive and non-cognitive factors affect students' academic achievement and success. This study investigates the impact of several non-cognitive factors (i.e., anxiety, beliefs, habits, motivation, context, and grit) on undergraduate students’ exam performance in a public research university. Participants were 646 undergraduate students taking a statistics course designed for business students. To obtain measures of students’ psychological dispositions and behaviors, students completed a survey that was developed for this study three times during the course of the semester, each time before students took one of the three course’s exams. Results from the three surveys indicated that although the impact of different non-cognitive factors on exam performance decreased over the course of the semester, anxiety, beliefs and intrinsic motivation statistically significantly predicted student exam scores and the cumulative exam score. In addition, results from latent class analysis of the first wave of survey responses allowed for the determination of several diagnostic classifications of students whose academic performance, as measured by their cumulative exam scores, may benefit from early intervention.