Exploring the Relationship Between Happiness and Academic Achievements Among East Asian Students

Happiness relates to life satisfaction and can impact an individual's activities in daily life. For students, it impacted their learning activities in and outside the school environment. The report by OECD in 2019 has indicated some East Asian countries and economies did not achieve the average life-satisfaction. Despite not achieving the average lifesatisfaction score, East Asian students has been top performers in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This paper focuses on studying aspects related to happiness with respect to the academic achievement of East Asian students in PISA. The data from PISA 2018 is extracted, integrated and analyzed to identify factors that may have impact towards happiness among East Asian students. Secondly is to ascertain the relationship between level of happiness and academic achievements across Reading, Math and Science domains in PISA. The main findings reveal that the top three correlated factors are frequency of being happy, subjective well-being and frequency of being joyful with each of the three factors having a correlation value of above 0.4 which indicate positive correlation with happiness. From this study it is suggested that activities in and outside the school environment that led to the top 3 correlated factors can be planned to inculcate a sense of happiness among students.