Investigating the Mediating Role of Meaning of Education in the Relationship between Academic Optimism and Academic Performance of Students

Academic performance is one of the important components in education that has always been addressed by programmers, school principals, teachers, and parents, who have always tried to provide appropriate conditions for enhancing the academic efficiency of students. This study was conducted to investigate the mediating role of meaning of education in the relationship between academic optimism and academic performance.

This study was an applied research in terms of research objective and a descriptive-correlational study in terms of gathering the data. Data were collected from a sample of 250 secondary school girls in Khorramdareh by random cluster sampling. Meaning of education Questionnaire (Henderson-King& Smith, 2006) and Academic Optimism Scale (Tschanen-Moran et al., 2013) were used to collect the data. Also to evaluate the academic achievement, the average score of students in the first and second semesters were used. Data were analyzed by structural equations in SPSS22 and MPLUS 7.4.

Findings showed that there was a significant positive relationship between academic optimism and academic performance (P<0.01) and that meaning of education plays a mediating role in this relationship.

The results show that academic optimism directly improves students chr('39')academic performance, but it affects indirectly the academic performance through the mediating role of meaning of education.