Encouraging Students' Performances by Training Soft Skills in Learning Process: Case Study of Public Economics Class

Abstract

This research purposes to examine the impacts of personal backgrounds, academic backgrounds, students' attitudes towards various things and important soft skills on students' academic achievement in public economics class in Thailand University. This study uses logistic regression to estimate the model. The questionnaire was contributed during the second semester of 2017 and 2018 academic year. There are consisting of five parts which are the demographic and general information including family background and academic background, economic factors, social factors, environment and support factors, and soft skill factors. There were 443 participants but only 231 observations with the complete questionnaires were used for estimation. The results show that high school background, lecturer support, and soft skills have positive influences on academic achievement while environment and other university supports, economic factors and social factors do not have significant impact on the students' performances. As a result, soft skills such as creativity skill and numeracy skill should be implemented during the learning process in order to elevate the students' performances. © 2020 ACM.