The Central Functioning of Successful Schooling: The Relationship between Academic Engagement and Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

Successful schooling, we argue, encompasses much more than just academic performance. Students attend school to appreciate and acquire other achievement-related attributes, for example: subjective well-being experiences, proactive engagement, and the seeking of mastery in different disciplinary areas. One notable focus in research development, from the paradigm of positive psychology, relates to the identification of specific patterns in relationships between academic performance, subjective wellbeing, and proactive engagement. This line of inquiry, we contend, may yield a number of educational significance for teachers, school administrators, and stakeholders to consider. For example, in terms of positive school experiences, how can educators provide intervention programs that could facilitate and improve student engagement? In a similar vein, how can school counsellors foster enriched subjective wellbeing experiences? Social sciences research in recent years has consisted of and included the use of complex methodologies. Longitudinal data, both experimental and non-experimental, for example, provide strong methodological grounding for the study of complex relationships. In line with this stringency, we developed a specific conceptualization that postulated the interrelations between academic engagement, subjective well-being, and achievement outcome in the area of mathematics. To our knowledge, very few, if any, research has yet focused on this conceptualized inquiry into the ‘antecedents’ and ‘consequences’ pattern – for example, does subjective well-being influence academic achievement or, in contrast, does academic achievement influence subjective well-being? Our correlational research, in this case, involved the collection of data (N = 118 girls, 164 boys) across multiple occasions. This focus of inquiry, framed within the techniques of structural equation modeling (SEM), is innovative for its theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions.