Relationship between self-esteem and academic progress in physiotherapy students at Babol University of medical sciences

Indentifying the factors affecting on educational progress and or academic degradation is very impotent in education fields. Some researchers have been reported a direct relation between the self-esteem and educational progress, while another authors have doubted such direct relation. This study was aimed to determining the relationship between self-esteem and educational progress in physiotherapy students at Babol University of medical sciences.
In this correlation study, initially 52 physiotherapy students, undergraduate level, interred; but finally 45 subjects completed the questionnaire with the consent and consciously. The questionnaire included two parts: demographic information’s and cooper-smith valid test with 58 questions. The cooper-smith questionnair was used to measuring the student’s self-esteem. Also, the correlation between self-esteem and average score and other demographic data was surveyed. Data analyzed using pearson's test and t-test via SPSS.
FINDINGS: The mean of student’s self-esteem and their average score determined 34.10±6.34 and 16.866±1.059 respectively. There was not a significant correlation between the student’s self-esteem and average score (p=0.255). The mean of student’s self-esteem was significantly lower in boy students (32.00±5.394) with respect to girl students (36.42±6.628) (p=0.028). A significant correlation was found between student’s self-esteem and marital status (p=0.020); the mean of self-esteem in married students and unmarried students were 41.00±1.414 and 33.33±6.211. Additionally, there was not found any significant correlation between Paternal education level and student’s iterance rank and between age and self-esteem (p>0.05).
The student’s self-esteem is a Complex issue and somewhat independent of educational progress and Paternal education level. Interestingly, self-esteem was higher in girl's students and married individuals with respect to boy's students and unmarried individuals respectively.