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Performing well academically is intrinsically linked to how confident a student feels about his or her work.
Students who feel good about themselves and their ability tend to be more optimistic about their likelihood of doing well in school. In addition they are likely to have an easier time handling academic tasks and resisting negative peer pressure.
Conversely, students with low self-confidence can find academic challenges to be a source of real anxiety and frustration. Students who think poorly of themselves often find academic problem solving difficult and consequently are prone to giving up easily.
Success is a Virtuous Circle
Each time a student gains a grade that achieves or exceeds their expectations, it will improve his or her confidence and increase their capacity for further successful work in that area.
The success that the student achieves will increase their likelihood of achieving further success in academic tasks of a similar kind. In this way, the day to day academic achievements that students experience can be vital in terms of their final educational outcomes.
How Students Develop Confidence
Students will develop confidence in their ability when they are exposed to learning materials that they can access easily and which make immediate sense to them.
If faced with material which doesn’t appear to be directly useful and which the student is required to try and make evaluative judgements of, they are more likely to experience self-critical thoughts such as "I can't do it" or “It’s too hard for me.”
In such circumstances, students can become passive consumers of inappropriate material, leading to unreflective and poorly constructed work – the ‘cut and paste homework assignment’.
The circle is often completed when the student receives a poor grade, leading them to draw further negative conclusions about their academic ability, summarised by the self-fulfilling prophesy "I'm no good at school work."
How Autology Can Help
Autology can be a key tool in improving students’ academic confidence, particularly if used strategically by teaching and CRA staff.
Firstly, because Autology works best when using conceptual searching, this enables students to search for what they need using natural language. They don’t have to frame their searches in academic or technical terminology which might not make immediate sense to them. Instead they can frame what they want to find out about and receive appropriate and suitable resources using terms of reference that do make sense to them.
Secondly, because the resources within Autology are curriculum relevant and key stage differentiated, students can very quickly see that every resource that is returned is relevant to the work that they are doing. This gives the student an immediate sense of accomplishment because they haven’t had to spend a lot of time searching for and evaluating the usefulness of the returns. Also, the work that they are likely to produce is far more likely to gain them a satisfactory grade.
This is not to say that Autology removes the necessity for students to select and use resources effectively; they will still have to plan and structure their work and make critically appropriate decisions about which resources to use, how and where.
Autology gives students access to learning materials that they can find quickly and easily and which are clearly relevant, using search language that makes sense to them. This in turn will encourage students to feel positive about the work they produce.
Since the materials they will have used will be directly educationally relevant, and since Autology only contains age appropriate curricular materials, the grades that they receive are likely to boost their confidence even further.
How Autology Can Help
If you’d like to find out more about Autology, or sign up for your school, please get in touch and we’d be delighted to discuss the options with you.
Performing well academically is intrinsically linked to how confident a student feels about his or her work.
Students who feel good about themselves and their ability tend to be more optimistic about their likelihood of doing well in school. In addition they are likely to have an easier time handling academic tasks and resisting negative peer pressure.
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