The Relationships of Self-esteem, Attitudes, and Gender to Achievement in Writing: Bahir Dar University First Year Students in Focus

Abstract

The study examined the relationships of self-esteem, attitudes, and gender to achievements in writing. It also explored gender differences in the variables treated. For the study, 272 participants were selected using multistage and purposive sampling techniques. To gather data, different scales and tests were used. Parametric tests such as t-test, Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient, and multiple regressions were the major statistical techniques applied to analyze the data. The results revealed that male students surpass female students in all the variables treated. It was also found that the relationships of most of the variables were significant except for the non-significant relationships of writing self-esteem and writing attitude to global self-esteem and academic self-esteem to writing self-esteem. Moreover, the output of the multiple regressions showed that the predictor variables in combination account for 40% of the variances in writing achievement. Writing self-esteem and writing attitudes were found to be the best predictors among the independent variables. The findings seem to suggest that attention be paid to the correlates of students' writing skills.