- Peer Rejection as a Serious Challenge Negatively influencing Academic Excellence and Behavioral Outcomes
- Issues
- First Issue: Peer Rejection as a Serious Challenge Negatively influencing Academic Excellence and Behavioral Outcomes
- There is a close relationship between aggressive behavior and poor academic performances in learners under the prevailing condition of peer rejection. This view ascends from the fact that peer rejection deprives learners of socialization during the learning process. Such deprivation affects the learning domains, including the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. The disturbances imposed upon the learning domains results in the adoption of aggressive behavior and backwardness in academic performance.
- Reactive (aggression in reaction to provocation) and proactive aggression (objective-oriented calculated aggression) subtypes of aggression which arise from peer rejection have differential effects on executive functioning and verbal intelligence capacities. Thus peer rejection mediates a core role between academic performance and other vital dimensions of life, such as communication skills.
- Peer rejection leads to social exclusion, which affects victims’ development in social and emotional domains. Peer rejection makes victims despondent in their immediate environment and indeed resort to finding solace in deviant practices and behavior. Such individuals get emotionally disconnected from other people in their loneliness, which hardens their emotions negatively. Also, such a person may become temperamental, less caring, and bitter for the rest of their lives.
- Second Issue: Developmental Pathways of Peer Rejection
- Positive peer associations exhibit positive co-relationship with children’s social adjustment in which being socially rejected denotes to a risk factor for both long-term and short-term maladaptive effects in different developmental areas. In contrast, peer rejection may excite the adoption of a questionable code of conduct gradually, leading to total deviance from societal norms and standards.
- Victims of peer rejection constitute fewer opportunities for developing their social skills that are produced in peer relationships such as companionship and intimacy. This conception rests on the view that peer rejection alienates victims from the warmth of peer conversations and interactions, which otherwise form the basis of creating meaningful relationships.
- As rejection intensifies, peers may react to rejection by developing uniquely distorted social cognitions, which may pave the way for the development of antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior may turn out to be the consolation avenue for the rejected persons. Such persons may find it challenging to resume into the pathways of self-development and actualization in career-related affiliations.
- Further, peer rejection is a construct of an individual’s physical attractiveness. Low physical attractiveness can excite rejection in both boys and girls. Physical attractiveness mediates between peer rejection and social anxiety. Such rejection in the social institution has lifelong implications in future life and experiences, especially along with career formations and development since rejection distorts confidence and capacities to infer meaningful conclusions in life.
- Third Issue: Peer Rejection impacts Developmental Perspective of Victims
- Deviant peer affiliation and peer rejection are interlinked to the development and maintenance of behavioral problems. In the school setting, rejected persons reside in isolation and despair due to negligence from friends. This may form the basis of adopting dubious behaviors to attract friends and peers; and discredit rejection.
- Peer rejection and deviancy training are two main processes (factors) associated with behavioral problems. Whereas deviancy may accelerate rejection, the victim may sink further into the wrong ways, which will further inculcate behavioral issues. As a result, rejection stands as a severe challenge that can affect not only the ability to acquire education, but also the capacities to blend well with societal universals and ethics.
- A mixture of peer rejection and other processes such as peer victimization may contribute to the development trajectory of conduct problems after post-secondary school. Peer rejection also has a far-reaching effect on the development of deviant peer affiliation and behavioral issues in the youth after secondary education. This may complicate the quest to further education post-secondary level.
Counterpoints
- Despite the above convictions against peer rejection, it is arguably valid that the impacts such as antisocial behavior and poor academic performances are mendable. The amendment from deviancy would require the arousal of one’s sense of consciousness. This will trigger personal responsibility and control over life in a manner that cannot be swayed by the shackles of peer rejection and humiliation.
- Peer rejection is inalienable circumstances entrenched in our social fabrics but which policy frameworks can address. The fact that physical attractiveness can be a basis of peer rejection implies the creation of awareness about the effects of peer rejection may disband people from rejecting their colleagues. Societal emancipation is, therefore, necessary and relevant in this case.
- Lastly, the victim of peer rejection may harness his/her experiences as a testimony to emancipate others and as an example to ascend the ladder of excellence. Thus, peer rejection is not wholly a negative prospect since a person may use it as a threshold to bring forth change and testimony that proclaims how one unchained self from the wants of peer rejection.
Conclusion
This study intended to discuss the question, “In what ways does Peer Rejection Impact a Post-Secondary Students’ Academic Outcomes in Post-Secondary Education?” Based on the exploration of the literature above, there is a robust positive co-relationship between peer rejection and reduced academic performances and antisocial behaviors, which in turn degrades a rejected victim’s social productivity post-secondary education. As articulated in the above issues, peer rejection equally constitutes a significant impact on a rejected person’s developmental pathways, especially in the construction of meaningful social relationships.