Academic Failure and Dropout: Untangling Two Realities

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">Academic failure and school dropout, or early school leaving, are two of the situations that most concern countries and educational institutions worldwide, because of their prevalence and also their economic and social implications. Despite this prominent role that academic failure and school dropout have in societies, there seems to be no consensus on the literature on their conceptualization, definition, and relationship. Moreover, it is frequent to observe how both concepts are confused or overlap in the scientific literature and how many authors avoid defining these constructs, using them indistinctly. Therefore, this work analyses whether educational research considers them as two different concepts or if they are used indistinctly. For this purpose, 2,051 keywords from 450 articles were subjected to a systematic review and classified into the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) thesaurus´ descriptors. The results reveal statistically significant differences in the descriptors according to the type of paper to which they correspond (academic failure or dropout). Thus, academic failure is associated with sociocultural, personal, and academic factors, while dropout is linked to employment and educational trajectories. These differences evidence that, although academic failure and school dropout refer to closely related educational problems, there are remarkable differences between them and between the treatment given to each of them in the scientific literature. Therefore, they should be considered as two different concepts. For all this, keyword analysis has proved to be a relevant element for the study of the structure of knowledge, allowing to clearly establish the differences between the two closely related concepts.</p>

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“…Según AlRyalat et al (2019), mientras que PubMed se especializa en la investigación biomédica y de ciencias de la vida, tanto WoS como Scopus son preferibles para la investigación multidisciplinar debido a su amplio alcance y cobertura. Por ello, se eligió WoS de Clarivate en lugar de Scopus de Elsevier, ya que WoS se ha elegido comúnmente como fuente de datos para estudios de análisis bibliométrico de salud mental (Berta et al, 2022;Guo et al, 2023;Urbán et al, 2023;Zhu et al, 2023) y deserción universitaria (Gutiérrez-de-Rozas et al, 2022;Véliz Palomino & Ortega, 2023;Wang et al, 2023) en los últimos años. En segundo lugar, WoS ofrece una amplia base de datos que abarca 256 disciplinas, lo que permite realizar búsquedas y análisis de información más precisos que otras bases de datos (Cansun & Arik, 2018).…”

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