Hope into Achievement: A Longitudinal Examination of Hope, Psychosocial Perceptions, and Academic Achievement in a Sample of High School Students

This study examined the longitudinal relationships among students' hope, school-related psychosocial perceptions (i.e., academic self-concept, self-efficacy, academic motivation, and goal valuation), and academic achievement across time via a series of surveys and structural equation models. The study's sample consisted of 531 ninth grade students from a public high school in a Western state. The study had two primary goals. The first was to examine how students' hope and school-related psychosocial perceptions predicted their subsequent academic achievement over the course of an academic school year. The second was to explore whether school-related psychosocial perceptions accounted for the positive relationship between students' hope and their academic achievement that several previous studies have reported. This study had two primary findings. First, both students' hope and school-related psychosocial perceptions predicted their subsequent academic achievement, with each variable having around a medium effect size. Second, although students' hope indirectly predicted their subsequent academic achievement via their school-related psychosocial perceptions, academic self-concept and academic motivation were found to be the two most meaningful contributors.