Perception of Psycho-Social School Environment, Personal Growth Initiative and Fear of Failure among EAMCET Aspirants

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to investigate whether there is a relationship between perception of psycho-social school environment, personal growth initiative and fear of failure in intermediate students. The study also aimed to observe whether there are gender differences between students going to colleges (viz. with EAMCET coaching and without EAMCET coaching) in terms of psycho-social school environment, personal growth initiative and fear of failure in intermediate students. The School Environment Inventory (Misra, 1984), the Personal Growth Initiative Scale-II (Robitschek et al., 2012) and the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (Conroy et. al., 2002) were administered on 300 intermediate students (150 boys and 150 girls) selected through a non-probability purposive sampling technique to measure the perception of psycho-social school environment, personal growth initiative and fear of failure respectively. The results indicated significant gender differences between the students going to colleges with coaching and the students going to colleges without coaching with respect to perception of psycho-social school environment and personal growth initiative (p<0.05). However, no significant gender differences were observed in fear of failure and its dimensions (p>0.05). Among students going to colleges with coaching negative correlations were observed between rejection, fear of experiencing shame and embarrassment  and personal growth initiative, moreover in this group, creative stimulation, cognitive encouragement and permissiveness (p<0.05) were positively correlated with using resources and negatively correlated with fears of important others losing interest (p<0.05). Also personal growth initiative was positively correlated with fears of upsetting important others and cognitive encouragement (p<0.05) in students going to colleges without coaching. The present study reiterates that perception of school environment by students is of paramount importance in promoting or hindering the student’s personal growth initiative and subsequently their fear of failure.