Discussion
This longitudinal study assessed the extent to which academic achievement and engagement were predicted from the academic achievement and engagement of friends and network members.
Concurrent Relations As expected, adolescent’s academic achievement was highly correlated with that of their friends and network members. This is consistent with findings from U.S. studies. Ryan (2001) found that students’ academic levels were similar to group’s academic levels with the correlations ranging from .36 to .58. Also, in another study, Ryan et al. (2013) found that students’ GPA associated with friends’ GPA across the first year in the middle school. In a recent study conducted by Shin and Ryan (2014), students’ academic achievement …show more content…
As mentioned before, one possible reason might be the measurement of academic engagement. Again, the concurrent relation between the engagement of friends and adolescents are low, it is not expected that the longitudinal relations are significant.
Limitations and Implications for Future Studies
One limitation lies in the academic engagement scale. Engagement is very important for predicting students’ academic achievement and for preventing their academic failure or drop-out (Kindermann & Skinner, 2012; Wang & Pomerantz, 2009). Perhaps, future study should pay attentions in the multiple measurements of the academic engagement constructs, and add teachers’ report on students’ academic engagement to minimize the self-report measurement error.
Another limitation is that the study only can assess peer influence procedure instead of peer selection procedure when applying multiple regression analysis. Thus, future study might need to provide more sophisticated analysis to disentangle the two procedures in explaining complex nature of peer associations and peer effects on students’ academic engagement and achievement at
This longitudinal study assessed the extent to which academic achievement and engagement were predicted from the academic achievement and engagement of friends and network members.
Concurrent Relations As expected, adolescent’s academic achievement was highly correlated with that of their friends and network members. This is consistent with findings from U.S. studies. Ryan (2001) found that students’ academic levels were similar to group’s academic levels with the correlations ranging from .36 to .58. Also, in another study, Ryan et al. (2013) found that students’ GPA associated with friends’ GPA across the first year in the middle school. In a recent study conducted by Shin and Ryan (2014), students’ academic achievement …show more content…
As mentioned before, one possible reason might be the measurement of academic engagement. Again, the concurrent relation between the engagement of friends and adolescents are low, it is not expected that the longitudinal relations are significant.
Limitations and Implications for Future Studies
One limitation lies in the academic engagement scale. Engagement is very important for predicting students’ academic achievement and for preventing their academic failure or drop-out (Kindermann & Skinner, 2012; Wang & Pomerantz, 2009). Perhaps, future study should pay attentions in the multiple measurements of the academic engagement constructs, and add teachers’ report on students’ academic engagement to minimize the self-report measurement error.
Another limitation is that the study only can assess peer influence procedure instead of peer selection procedure when applying multiple regression analysis. Thus, future study might need to provide more sophisticated analysis to disentangle the two procedures in explaining complex nature of peer associations and peer effects on students’ academic engagement and achievement at