Academic success: Challenges and confrontations of poor students of Brazilian public universities

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the satisfaction with academic performance and the factors that influence it in two groups of higher education majors in Technological and Agricultural Sciences and Education, Culture and Art. The sample is composed of 60 students from two Brazilian public universities (age-range = 18-39 years, Mdn = 21), graduates of public schools, distributed in a balanced way between the two genders (55% women). Students are predominantly from the first and second years, the most with family income up to two Brazilian minimum wages. We could observe that the students of Technological and Agricultural Sciences showed more dissatisfaction with academic performance than those of Education, Culture and Art. Regarding the factors that influence performance, the majority of students of Education, Culture and Art valued interpersonal factors for academic performance while the majority of Technological and Agricultural Sciences students valued intrapersonal factors. However, this last proposition should be carefully considered once it needs to be replicated with a larger sample, according to the a priori power analysis result.