The Success Connection: The Relationship Between Personal Coaching and Academic Success

Abstract

The research deals with a Personal-Academic Coaching Program based on "The Six Stages Coaching Model" for promoting students' achievements, self-efficacy and effective learning strategies. Research literature pertaining to this research relies on Positive Psychology (Seligman, 2007), Humanistic Psychology and Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1977) theories, and presents the Personal-Academic Coaching Model. The research examines the influence of personal academic coaching on students' achievements and the main findings of the first research stage. Statistical data shows that more than 30% of engineering students drop out in their first year which is not congruent with their academic ability. These data constituted the starting point for this research. The Program that was developed is a unique personal-academic coaching program for promoting students' learning, self-efficacy and academic achievements. All The coaches are college especially trained lecturers. The research aim was to examine the personal-academic coaching program's contribution to students' academic achievements. 407 engineering students in unsatisfactory academic status were chosen to participate in this mixed methods research. Partial findings revealed that students who participated in the personal coaching program reached higher achievements than their peers who did not. These findings reinforce the hypothesis that personal academic coaching contributes to improving students' grades and emphasizes the importance of investing in accompanying students in future programs. The validity of these findings will be examined in the second part of this research.