USU Conference Systems, International Conference on Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases (ICTROMI) 2017

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Correlation of nutritional status with academic achievement in adolescents
regia sabaraty sinurat

Last modified: 2017-10-27

Abstract


Academic achievement of adolescents are influenced by many factors, such as, nutritional status, demographic, and socioeconomic levels. Malnutrition is considered as a problem that limited the ability of learning and poor academic achievement. Objective to investigate the correlation of nutritional status with academic achievement in adolescents. We conducted a cross-sectional study on 12 to 15-year-old junior high school students in Batubara, North Sumatera during January 2015. Nutritional status was determined by weight-for-height. Academic achievement was recorded from their final results of school examination. Intelligence quotient (IQ) score was assessed by using Aptitude Test. Data were analysed with Spearman correlation and Chi-Square test. One hundred twenty-six subjects involved in this study. We  found the mean of age, paternal and maternal education levels, monthly household income, nutritional status, and IQ score were 14.3 years old, senior high school (37.3% and 36.5%), less than IDR 1 million (41.3%), normoweight (57.1%), and average (85.7%), consecutively. There were no significant correlation between obesity, overweight, and mild-moderate malnutrition with academic achievement (P=0.693, r=-0.167; P=0.927, r=0.023; P=0.899, r=-0.025). There was a weak correlation of normoweight with academic achievement (P=0.003, r=0.342). There was no significant correlation between nutritional status with IQ score (P=0.540). This study showed that there were no significant correlation between nutritional status and academic achievement, namely Indonesian and English language, and Science, but overweight and normoweight have significant correlation with Mathematics (P< 0.05). There was no significant correlation between nutritional status with IQ score (P> 0.05). There was a weak correlation of normoweight with academic achievement in adolescents.