Research Hit: Well-Being Boosts Academic Success
New large-scale research published shows relationship between well-being and academic performance.
You always say a healthy brain is a high-performing brain!
Yes, I do, it is actually quite obvious. In these pages I have reported multiple times on how various health measures impact cognitive performance, which includes learning in academic contexts.
What does this research add to this?
Well, the research I often share looks at specific contexts or interventions such as sleep and nutrition with various cognitive performance measures such as memory or attention. This paper, just out, tracked 215,635 students in Years 4–10 in South Australia, from 2016 to 2019. That’s a large population over a few years - they measured these students with their results in a standardised well-being measure: the Well-Being Engagement Collection Index. This was then mapped to their academic performance.
So seeing if well-being in general mapped to better performance - but surely there are so many factors that affect academic performance?
Yes, there are many factors that affect performance, family context, socioeconomic, relationships at school, and so on and so forth. But this is what makes this interesting - can we really see an impact with all those other factors at play?
Can we? What were the results?
Yes, there was a modest relationship between WEC and academic performance and this was consistent across student year levels and time periods. That is good news, and important news and shows that focusing on pupil well-being is not just about being nice - which we want to be anyhow.
But also interesting is that there was a gender-specific variation. Notably that the impact was higher on male students!
Oh that is interesting - so at schools and universities focus on wellbeing to improve academic performance…and especially in boys.
Yes, absolutely. Because it directly impacts having a healthy brain which is a high-performing brain.
Some articles on healthy high-performing brains:
Reference
Rebecca Marrone, Benjamin Lam, Abhinava Barthakur, et al.
The Relationship between Wellbeing and Academic Achievement: A Comprehensive Cross-Sectional Analysis of System Wide Data From 2016-2019.
Journal of Learning Analytics, 2024
DOI: 10.18608/jla.2024.8357