A cross-national, cross-cultural comparison of predictors of academic performance among Canadian and Malaysian university students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Poor academic outcomes among postsecondary students are a concern to academic institutions globally. Several sociodemographic, psychosocial, and academic functioning factors are proposed as contributory. As most literature is from Western countries, global generalizability is limited. The aim of this 1-year study was to conduct a prospective cross-cultural comparison of factors impacting academic performance among university students from Canada and Malaysia. Methods: First-year undergraduate students were recruited from University of Toronto Scarborough and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia at the start of their academic year. Participants completed a comprehensive range of self-report measures on relevant factors. Information on their year 1 academic performance was obtained from the universities. The data were assessed using Chi-square, analyses of variance, and multiple linear regressions. Results: For Canadian students (n = 224), parents' educational levels, self-reported stress, coping, mental health knowledge, and physical activity were predictors of year 1 academic performance. For Malaysian students (n = 139), gender, ethnicity, academic amotivation, and peer engagement were predictors of year 1 academic performance. Attrition over the year was higher among Canadians (6%) than Malaysians (0%), but numbers were insufficient to determine likely predictors of dropout. Conclusions: The differences in predictors of academic performance between the Canadian and Malaysian students suggest that cultural factors may play an important role in academic outcomes. Intervention and prevention strategies customized to the local context are supported.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".