The Effect of Self-Determination, Academic Adjustment, and Positive Thinking on Academic Performance with the Mediation of Achievement Goals

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of self-determination, academic adjustment, and positive thinking on academic performance with mediation of achievement goals. The method was descriptive of the path analysis kind. The population included all secondary high school gifted students in the city of Kerman. From among them 748 students (410 boys and 338 girls) were selected using multistage cluster sampling and within each cluster simple random sampling. In order to gather data, La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman, and Deci’s Basic Psychological Needs Scale (BPNS), Sinha and Singh’s Adjustment Inventory for School Students (AISS), Ingram and Wisnicki’s Automatic PositiveThoughts Questionnaire (ATQ-P), Middleton and Midgley’s Achievement Goals Scale (AGS), and Dortaj’s Academic Performance Questionnaire (APQ) were used. In regards to the fitness indices, the results of the path analysis indicate that the presented model has an appropriate fitness. self-determination, academic adjustment, and positive thinking had direct and significant effects on the academic performance. Also, positive thinking had the most significant indirect effect on the academic performance. These findings reveal that positive thinking is the most important factor in affecting academic performance. The importance of thinking and attitude, and their effects on all aspects of life including education, makes the role of conducting more researche in exploring and assessing the positive thinking more prominent.