On the association between students’ (domain-specific) subjective well-being and academic achievement—disentangling mixed findings

Abstract

Today, there is wide recognition of schools as places that should foster children’s learning and well-being alike. The past two decades have thus witnessed an upsurge in research on children’s subjective well-being (SWB) in school and how it relates to their academic achievement. The first meta-analysis on the SWB/achievement relation revealed substantial, yet unexplained variability in effect sizes across samples and studies. In this context, in the present investigation we examined three potential sources of differential SWB/achievement relations: The domain-specificity of measures (global/school-specific/math-specific), the type of SWB component (cognitive/affective), and the type of achievement indicator (test-based/grade-based). Data from N = 767 8th and 9th grade students from German secondary schools were assessed via latent factor analyses. Our findings generally point towards stronger SWB/achievement relations with a more specific and specificity-matching rather than a less specific and specificity-mismatched SWB measure, with SWB’s cognitive rather than its affective component, and with a grade- rather than test-based indicator of academic achievement. We discuss differences in our findings by type of SWB component as well as by level of domain-specificity, and we provide initial empirical evidence supporting the relevance of SWB’s subject-specific measures.