Good university student practices that predict academic performance

Abstract

In the educational field, there is a growing need to identify and review good practices as models to be followed. However, despite the fact that current educational models aim to focus on the student and his or her learning process, the focus of these studies has been on institutions and/or their teachers. A number of skills related to teamwork, time management, active learning, etc. have been identified as students’ good practice. In this paper we search for the relationship between students’ good practice and academic performance. A total of 461 students from the Equinocial University of Ecuador participated in the study. They responded to a language adaptation of the Spanish version of the University Students’ Good Practice Inventory (IBPEU), original by Chickering and Schlossberg (1995) and a sociodemographic questionnaire. The results show that the group of students with better academic performance also showed a higher level of use of good practices than those with average and low performance. Differences were also found with regard to gender, age and the scientific area studied, with higher levels of performance being obtained by female students who scored higher in the factor of Interacting with teachers and a change in trend in students over 22 years of age, compared to the group aged 18 to 21.