Exploring the Role of Psychological Capital and Academic Hope in High School Students: How they interact With Their Cognitive Strategies to Influence Learning Outcomes?

Abstract

High school students who possess and exhibit psychological capital (PsyCap) evaluate their goal determining behaviours and cognitive strategies through displaying self-efficacy, hope, optimism and academic resilience to attain higher learning outcomes. In the first study, the factorial structure of PsyCap as second order construct with 4 first order sub-facets was examined. In addition, in a time-lag research, the direct and indirect effect of instrumentality of learning on performance via PsyCap and deep cognitive strategies was also examined by using Structural Equation Modeling. Three hundred and four (N=304) high school students participated in the study. The results indicated that psychological capital and deep cognitive strategies were significantly correlated. Also, the outcome of Study 1 concluded that psychological capital partially mediated the relationship between the perceived instrumentality of a learning activity and academic performance whereas deep cognitive strategies did not predict achievement outcome and consequently did not have mediational effect. Moreover, when individual subscales of PsyCap were regressed separately, only academic hope and optimism emerged as significant predictors of achievement outcome controlled for self-efficacy and resilience. In a follow-up experimental study, the moderating effect of academic hope in explaining the generation and utilization of deep cognitive strategies was observed in an academic failing condition versus a neutral condition. The participants (N=131) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups and read accounts of two conditions: failing versus non-failing conditions. Later they were requested to generate and rate the likelihood of using cognitive strategies in admission exam. The results of the moderation analysis indicated that when faced with failing learning condition students were more likely to generate quantitatively more cognitive yet not deep strategies compared to their counterparts in an academic neutral condition. However, when faced with the experimental condition, students higher on hope were more likely to utilize deep cognitive strategies. Thus, academic hope moderated the effect of the experimental condition on the utilisation of deep strategies. The results of the 2 studies is discussed in the light of Conservation of Resources theory, Expectancy-Value and Hope theory.