School happiness and its correlation to academic performance of high school students

Abstract

School happiness has been proven to impact the holistic development of students. Therefore, educational institutions constantly strive to create a happy learning environment with happy learning and interactions within school context. Using quantitative research methods with convenience sampling, this study evaluated the happiness of 218 11th-grade students at 5/10 high schools on aspects of Teaching activities, Experiential activities, Relationships, and School participation. The results showed that students felt quite happy in all these aspects, with average scores ranging from 3.82 to 4.04. Pearson correlation analysis revealed statistically significant positive correlations between students’ perceived happiness in Teaching activities, Relationships, and Participation and their academic performance. There is, however, no significant correlation between students’ happiness in Experiential activities and academic performance. The results emphasize that it is necessary to continue improving the school environment to develop learners and enhance the quality of education, further studies on the impactful factors and student happiness at all school levels are needed in order to have relevant strategies to build a happy school.