A child’s crucial development encompasses creating trust and confidence within themselves as they utilize their capabilities and improve the things, which they deemed, resulted to their mistakes and drawbacks. Thus, seeing students developing their full potential while having a commendable relationship with others and openness to one’s self definitely make teachers feel delighted.
Self- esteem refers to how people perceive themselves and this develops along with their experiences. In such case, positive experiences concerning one’s confidence and feelings surely create optimistic impact in their self- esteem development. Meanwhile, negative experiences give detrimental effects on them, especially, the repetitive ones.
Among children, self- esteem develops through simple gestures of appreciation and appraisal. This starts with the simple star marks on their wrists, to a ‘Good Job!’ mark on their notes and finally, with their praiseworthy grades from their academic performance. Things are usually as simple as that for kids. However, simple failures could also give them a huge view of being incapable or not enough.
Yazon (2015) stated that self- esteem has a direct correlation with academic performance. The study conducted has shown that honor students usually demonstrate higher self- esteem and competency than the average ones. This further proves that a student’s self- esteem may be enforced or developed through their academic achievement.
In addition, Fryberg, et al. (2017), by studying the effect of self- esteem to the academic performance of students within racial- ethnic groups, affirmed that self- esteem is crucial for children’ s motivation and will to ascend their academic performance and excel in class. It is further emphasized that developing high self- esteem at a young age may help students to be optimistic in the succeeding years.
Apart from self- esteem, learning strategies are highly believed to affect academic performance of students. Sihotangi, et al. (2017) defined learning strategies as a learning activity that must be done by teachers and students so learning can be achieved effectively and efficiently.
Moreover, choosing the best teaching and learning strategy procedures, methods and techniques is essential to carry out certain goals within a class. Additionally, this enables the establishment of certain learning climate and practices suitable for a type of class and their characteristics.
With these, it is highly emphasized that self- esteem and learning strategies could impact the students’ academic performances and possibly, each may also have a significant effect to one another.
Digging deeper into these aspects is necessary for the potential discovery of effective ways to boost students’ learning and academic performance. For teachers, bring out the best in their students requires efforts and consistency in discovering how to do so.
Keywords: self- efficacy, academic performance, learning strategies