Research Spotlight No. (14)
Why do some students persist in studying the natural sciences while others fall behind?
A study from the Faculty of Education at Beni Suef University reveals the pivotal role of emotions and academic empowerment among bilingual students.
Many Egyptian university students in scientific disciplines face a dual challenge: mastering highly complex scientific content while engaging with it in English, which is not their native language. From this standpoint, Prof. Dr. Mohamed Mokheimer and Prof. Dr. Eid Abu Ghoneima, from the Faculty of Education at Beni Suef University, sought to answer a fundamental question: what enables some students to persevere longer, while others withdraw?
The study included 302 students enrolled in science teacher preparation programs (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and STEM). It was grounded in two complementary psychological frameworks. The first is Robert Marzano’s Self-System Thinking (SST), which examines how students evaluate the importance of a subject, their sense of self-efficacy, and their emotional responses toward it. The second is Academic Self-Determination (ASD), which measures students’ autonomy, self-regulation, sense of empowerment, and self-actualization.
The study went beyond questionnaires by assessing two practical outcomes: persistence in learning natural sciences and fluency in reading scientific texts in English, using oral assessments evaluated with high inter-rater reliability (0.91).
The findings revealed that positive emotions and self-efficacy are the strongest driving forces, with Marzano’s framework alone explaining approximately 60% of the variance in students’ persistence. Within the ASD framework, psychological empowerment emerged as the most influential dimension. Students’ perception of the value of what they learn, their academic freedom of choice, their sense of competence, and their belief in their ability to influence their environment were all key factors driving persistence.
A notable finding of the study is that reading fluency is closely linked to momentary emotional states and immediate feelings of competence. This indicates that success in reading scientific material requires not only language proficiency but also emotional readiness at the moment of performance.
By integrating both frameworks into a unified analytical model, the researchers demonstrated that supporting students requires two parallel approaches: addressing both emotional and cognitive dimensions, and enhancing autonomy and empowerment.
These findings translate into pressing educational recommendations: building students’ confidence, reducing anxiety, assigning them active roles in laboratories and classrooms, and providing growth-oriented feedback rather than judgmental evaluation. Such measures are not educational luxuries but strategic necessities to support a generation of graduates capable of effectively overcoming academic and linguistic challenges and contributing to Egypt Vision 2030 in the fields of science and technology.
The research was published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, published by Springer Nature, with an impact factor of 3.6, and ranked in the first quartile (Q1) of Web of Science (WOS) journals in the field of social sciences.
Publication fees were funded through the open access agreement between the Science, Technology and Innovation Funding Authority (STDF) and the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB) with Springer Nature.
English brief: This study of 302 bilinguals (Arabic–English) undergraduates in Egypt investigated how Marzano's self-system thinking (SST) and academic self-determination (ASD) relate to science persistence and scientific reading fluency. Using a cross-sectional design with high inter-rater reliability (0.91), results revealed that SST emotional response and efficacy were the strongest correlates of both outcomes, with SST alone explaining 59.7% of the variance in science persistence. Within the ASD framework, psychological empowerment emerged as a robust predictor. The findings underscore the critical role of affective engagement and academic agency, suggesting that fostering emotional readiness is vital for bilingual students' success in STEM disciplines
Research Title:
Self-system thinking and academic self-determination as correlates of science persistence and scientific reading fluency in bilingual university students
Research Link:
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07111-4