10 Psychological and Biological Factors Influencing Your Study Results - Distancelearningportal.com

10 Psychological and Biological Factors Influencing Your Study Results

There are plenty of factors influencing your learning process either in a positive or a negative way. In addition to what is already determined by your genes, according to various sources, the following biological and psychological factors play an important role.

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Which are the main biological factors?

1. Nutrition

Nutrition is essential for organs to develop (building material), but also to let it operate (fuel). On average, as much as 25% of all energy a human daily takes in with one's food goes directly to the brains.

In those moments when the brain goes through major developments such as during childhood and adolescence, this percentage may increase to 65%.

2. Caffeine

Caffeine is one of the most consumed psychoactive substances around the world. Caffeine is not bad for health, some researchers even show positive effects. Caffeine appears to reduce fatigue.

And in this way also has an indirect effect on learning. Regarding cognitive function, caffeine has an effect on reaction time. Some studies also show a positive effect on long-term memory.

3. Sports

Practising sports is healthy, as more and more research shows. For example, sports ensure that certain substances in the body are released, which have a significant effect on the brains. These compounds support brain functions and increase the ability to learn and perform.

Research has shown that elderly people who on a daily basis have a medium to heavy physical effort of at least 30 minutes have a better cognitive performance than people who do not.

4. Sleep

Sleep is a biological factor that can affect the learning performance of people. In particular, too little sleep has a major impact. It leads to memory and concentration problems, people have more difficulty responding flexibly to new situations and there is a stronger response to emotionally negative stimuli.

Psychological Factors Influencing Your Study Results

Now, which are the main psychological factors?

5. Learning strategy

Everyone has their own preference for a strategy to learn and study. Some prefer to make a summary, others highlight or underline important text and read the same text several times. But the preference that someone follows is not always the most effective strategy.

There is a distinction between learning strategies at a superficial level, and at a deeper level. Learning through repetition is an example of learning at a superficial level. Learning at a deeper level involves, for example, the ability to determine important information and make connections between certain concepts. Learning at a deeper level has proven to be a better predictor for successful learning in the long term than on a superficial level.

6. Self-regulating capacity

Self-regulating The capacity to self-regulate has a positive relationship with academic achievement. When someone has a large self-regulating capacity, he/she is well able to orient, plan, monitor and adapt his / her behaviour or learning processes and strategies during learning tasks.

7. Self-directed learning

It also appears that self-directed learning has a positive correlation with academic success. Such a person is able to assess his / her own learning needs, establish personal goals, make decisions about which learning strategies to use and is able to assess the outcomes.

8. Self-esteem

Specialised literature shows a positive correlation between self-esteem and academic achievement, but it is not clear which way this effect works. The assumption is that the higher your self-esteem, the better you perform in school.

But it is also possible that the effect works the other way around: the better you perform in school, the higher your self-esteem is as a result.

9. Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is a term used in education to indicate whether a person believes he or she is able to successfully complete courses or certain specific tasks. Multiple studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between self-efficacy and academic performance actually achieved.

Someone with as a high self-efficacy for English writing strongly believes that he or she is well able to write an English text and, as a result, will get a good grade for an English writing assignment.

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10. Motivation

Someone with persistence to study from an intrinsic motivation (internal drive by person self to study) will in the long term perform better than someone with persistence from an extrinsic motivation (i.e. showing behaviour because of a certain reward).

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