How social support predicts academic achievement among secondary students with special needs: the mediating role of self-esteem

Background Students are an essential part and parcel of society, and their mental health, academic achievement, and success are the pillar objectives of a successful educational system. Based on this, students need to be well-equipped to overcome academic difficulties and challenges. Social support and self-esteem are known to play a major role in education and nurture students’ academic achievement. Despite their important attributions, studies however have not examined the joint effects of social support and the mediating role of self-esteem on academic achievement in the context of Kurdistan Region, Iraq. To this end, using a sample of 200 secondary students with special needs (mean age of 14 years) in the city of Halabja, this study tested a structural equation modeling to examine the effect of social support on academic achievement and the potential mediating role of self-esteem between social support and academic achievement. The students with special needs in our sample completed two validated scales to assess their social support and self-esteem and reported their past year’s academic achievement. Results The participants in this study scored the highest on significant other ( M = 4.46) and the lowest on friends’ support ( M = 3.95). With regard to self-esteem, the participants reported the mean score of 3.78, indicating a reasonable level of self-esteem. The results of SEM showed that there is a statistically significant difference ( p 0.05). Our SEM results also revealed that the effect of family on students’ self-esteem was found to be statistically significant ( p 0.05). Also, SEM findings confirmed that the indirect effects of family and friends on academic achievement were statistically significant ( p