Self-acceptance and its relationship to academic achievement among middle school students

Abstract

The current research aims to identify self-acceptance and academic achievement and the relationship between them among middle school students, and to identify statistically significant differences in self-acceptance and academic achievement among middle school students according to the gender variable (males - females), specialization (scientific, literary). The research sample consisted of (250) male and female students from middle and secondary schools in the Baghdad Education Directorate / Al-Karkh II for the academic year (2023-2024) for morning study, with (125) male and female students from the scientific specialization and (125) from the literary specialization, as for gender, it amounted to (125) males and (125) females, who were chosen by the equal stratified random method. The researcher adapted the Imaging Scale (2022) to measure the concept of self-acceptance on the research sample. The self-acceptance scale consists of (35) paragraphs distributed over five dimensions, and the five-point Likert scale was adopted. By setting (5) alternatives to answer the self-acceptance scale, which are (always, often, sometimes, rarely, never), the validity and reliability of the scale items were calculated. As for academic achievement, the researcher used the students' results for the first semester of the year (2023-2024), where the students were divided into levels according to their academic grades through the results of the semester tests. The researcher used the statistical methods that were calculated by the computer program (SPSS): Chi-square test (Ka2), T-test for one sample, T-test for two independent samples, Pearson's correlation coefficient, Alpha-Cronbach's equation for internal consistency, simple regression analysis, and the most prominent results were as follows: The research sample has a good degree of self-acceptance, there are no statistically significant differences in self-acceptance between the specialization (scientific-literary), the research sample has good grades in academic achievement, there are no statistically significant differences between (males and females) in academic achievement, The academic achievement in the scientific specialization is higher than the academic achievement in the literary specialization, and there is a positive correlation relationship with a good degree of significance between the research variables (self-acceptance and academic achievement).