Self-esteem

Self-esteem or self-respect has a clear relationship with school performance. Self-esteem can be considered a non-specific form of motivation. Self-esteem is not an unambiguous concept. It has different aspects: personal, academic, physical, social, etc. that can be present independently of each other.
A few years ago, schools in California started teaching self-esteem. The idea was that if self-esteem increased, self-esteem would improve as well. The study of students who took these classes showed that the increased self-esteem had no impact on performance. The reverse was happening; better performance led to increased self-esteem. Self-esteem did not increase by constantly telling students how well they did something; even when it comes to very simple tasks. The main cause of the increased self-esteem was that students had taken on a real challenge and successfully completed it.

Feedback
Because motivation depends on engaged and real feedback, learning remains problematic as long as the negative cycle of low ability that generates low self-confidence, which in turn leads to even lower performance, is not broken.
This requires a flexible approach that is not based solely on age-based progression. This applies to both gifted and weaker students. Gifted students often find that keeping in line is not challenging enough and can climb to a more appropriate level in a flexible system. For students, for whom the standard curriculum is far too theoretical, keeping up with peers leads irrevocably to failure. By staying longer on a horizontal level and experiencing more success there, the negative cycle is broken. The increasing self-esteem increases their motivation, further increasing performance.