The relationship among core competencies and academic achievement of university STUDENTS: Latent Profile Analysis

Abstract

With industrial development such as the 4th industrial revolution and the resulting social and cultural changes, the human resources required are also changing rapidly. In this regard, higher education institutions are trying various ways to nurture future talents that can address the new challenges. The core competencies that reflect the university's establishment goals and talents through the case of K-University in Korea and attempted to verify the relationship among core competencies and academic achievement was examine in this research. To this end, it was found that the core proficiencies of K-University students, classified the group profile through the results, and confirmed the characteristics. In addition, we tried to analyze the predictive effect that affected the core competencies. In this research, 983 current K-University students were tested for the core competencies for five days from April 12 to 16, 2021. There are five core competencies at K-University: Humanities, communications, global awareness, creativity, and professional competencies, and each core competency consists of three sub-factors. The latent profiles with heterogeneous characteristics were classified through the results of the core competency diagnosis of the students. From this study, three potential groups were determined, and the students were classified into these groups. The classified potential groups were named upper group, middle group, and lower group, respectively, and a characteristics and influence of the student's gender, grade, and major were complete. The key results are the following: When group 1 was set as the reference group, the student's gender and major were found to be significant factors in the comparison between the groups. In the comparison between upper group and middle group, when the gender was female and the major was science and engineering, the probability of being included to the middle group was high. Finally, as a result of examining the academic achievement level by potential profile according to the core competency aspect, it was confirmed that the higher the core competency level, the higher the academic achievement level. This study is significant in that it analyzed the factors that affect college students' core competencies and comprehensively analyzed the relationship between core competencies and academic success.

Keywords: Core competencies, academic achievement, university student, latent profile analysis (LPA)