Student commitment and school organization in relation to on-task behavior and achievement

Three experiments considered student commitment to school, IQ, and school organization type in relation to student task behavior and to school achievement. The first two correlational studies indicated the relationship between student commitment and student task behavior; the third study used student task behavior, student commitment, IQ, and school organization to predict achievement. This prediction equation was quite robust with a final R² = .85. School achievement is predicted by intelligence and academic time on task in traditionally structured schools, and by intelligence and student commitment in open structured schools. Increasing the amount of teacher directed time would increase achievement in traditional schools, but decrease achievement in open schools.     

Recalled test anxiety in relation to achievement,in the context of general academic self-concept,study habits,parental involvement and socio-economic status among Grade 6 Ethiopian students

The study investigated the predictive nature of test anxiety on achievement in the presence of perceived general academic self-concept, study habits, parental involvement in children's learning and socio-economic status. From a population of 2482 Grade 6 students from seven government primary schools of a sub-city in Addis Ababa, 497 participants were randomly selected, namely 248 boys and 249 girls. The mean age of the participants was 12.98 years. An adapted version of Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale (28 items), plus the General Academic Self-Concept Scale (18 items), and Parental Involvement (10 items), Study Habits (10 items) and Socio-Economic Status (10 items) scales developed by the authors were the instruments of the study. The findings of the study indicated: (a) test anxiety correlated with achievement with a weak correlation of ?0.186; and (b) perceived general academic self-concept and study habits were positively and significantly related to achievement. Stepwise multiple regression on achievement resulted in the selection of general academic self-concept, study habits and parental involvement as significant contributors to achievement in that order. Test anxiety was found to be a non-predictor of achievement in the presence of other variables.     

Temperamental task orientation: Relation to high school and college educational accomplishments

To evaluate the role of temperamental task orientation in adolescents' academic success, we examined its relation to educational accomplishments in high school and college using longitudinal data. Participants (N = 110) were assessed at 15, 16, and 17 years of age with a follow-up at 24 years. Adolescent self-report and parent reports of task orientation at 16 were used to predict high school and college GPA, SAT scores, perseverance in college, and degree attainment. Task orientation related to high school GPA and accounted for variance above and beyond SES and IQ in predicting high school and college GPA. An interaction emerged between IQ and task orientation: increasing levels of task orientation were associated with higher GPA for students with higher intelligence, but not for those with relatively lower intelligence. These findings highlight the contribution of non-intellective factors to academic achievement in secondary and post-secondary education.     

Personality traits and general intelligence as predictors of academic performance: A structural equation modelling approach

The aim of the present study was to investigate the extent to which personality traits, after controlling for general intelligence, predict academic performance in different school subjects. Upper secondary school students in Sweden (N = 315) completed the Wonderlic IQ test (Wonderlic, 1992) and the IPIP-NEO-PI test (Goldberg, 1999). A series of hierarchical structural equation models showed that general intelligence, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism were significantly linked to overall academic performance. There were also different findings for a lower level of personality traits, e.g. different personality traits were associated with different subjects. The findings are discussed with regard to previous results on personality traits as determinants of academic performance in different school subjects and the fact that lower level traits may facilitate achievement in particular subjects.     

THE ROLE OF CATTELL–HORN–CARROLL (CHC) COGNITIVE ABILITIES IN PREDICTING WRITING ACHIEVEMENT DURING THE SCHOOL‐AGE YEARS

Writing is a complex academic task—it involves numerous mental processes. Given the necessity for developing writing skills from elementary to secondary school, this study aimed to investigate the role of broad cognitive abilities derived from the Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence in predicting skills associated with writing achievement. The normative sample from the fourth edition of the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities and the Woodcock–Johnson Tests Academic Achievement were used to examine the relationships between broad CHC abilities and academic achievement in writing. The findings of this study suggest that the broad CHC abilities Comprehension‐Knowledge, Processing Speed, and Fluid Reasoning are especially important predictors of basic writing skills and written expression during the school‐age years. In general, changes in the strength of the association between cognitive abilities and academic achievement in writing are observed over time, as the cognitive demands involved in the writing increase in complexity in later grades.     

Prediction of School Outcomes Based on Early Language Production and Socioeconomic Factors

Early differences in family SES, child language production, and IQ were related to outcomes in early elementary school in the present prospective, 10-year longitudinal study. In a prior study of family interactional variables associated with language learning, major differences in parenting (i.e., time, attention, and talking) were found to be associated with differences in child productive vocabulary between 7 to 36 months of age, and child IQ, favoring higher-SES parents. Lower-SES children were exposed less often than higher-SES children to diverse vocabulary through their parents' attention and talking, and they were prohibited from talking more often. In the current study, 32 children involved in the earlier study were repeatedly assessed between 5 to 10 years of age, while in kindergarten through third grade. Results indicated that SES-related differences in child language prior to school were predictive of subsequent verbal ability, receptive and spoken language, and academic achievement assesed on standardized tests in kindergarten through grade 3. However, none of the predictor variables were related to direct measures of elementary schooling. When combined with a composite SES indicator, early child language production significantly increased the variance accounted for in the prediction of elementary language and academic competencies in each subsequent year in elementary school. Implications are discussed in terms of the stability of performance on language and academic performance measures of children who entered school with different early language learning experiences, and the need to consider early home- and school-based intervention designed to prevent or ameliorate these trends.     

Mathematics Learning Development: the Role of Long-Term Retrieval

This study assessed the relation between long-term memory retrieval and mathematics calculation and mathematics problem solving achievement among elementary, middle, and high school students in nationally representative sample of US students, when controlling for fluid and crystallized intelligence, short-term memory, and processing speed. As hypothesized, structural equation modeling comparing elementary school students and middle and high school students revealed that long-term retrieval skills became a better predictor of both mathematics calculation and mathematics problem solving as age and grade increased. Future research should focus on the effectiveness of interventions to improve long-term retrieval skills in general, and arithmetic facts retrieval and problem solving procedures in particular, at all grades, including high school.     

Growth in Intelligence under Differing School Environments

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the predictive quality of reading coping strength and comprehension coping strength measured under conditions of delayed auditory feedback as they relate to self-concept, anxiety, reading achievement, intelligence, and academic ability. Reading tests under delayed auditory feedback were administered to fifty-one sixth-grade students in the Memphis City School System, Memphis, Tennessee. Subjects were chosen from five elementary schools (three white and two Negro ). Reading error scores, under conditions of DAF, were tabulated as a measure of reading coping strength and comprehension coping strength. Eight hypotheses were established and tested by ANOVA, t-test, correlation and multiple correlation. Overall results of the study tend to identify coping strength as a unique variable to consider in the psychology of reading as well as the psychology of such noncognitive variables as anxiety and self-concept.

The problem of this study was to make a systematic investigation of the ability of children at the sixth grade level to cope with the effects of delayed auditory feedback while reading. The ability to cope with such effects was defined as reading coping strength and comprehension coping strength. These two variables, reading coping strength and comprehension coping strength, were studied to determine their ability to predict academic success and to compare their predictive strength with that of IQ and reading achievement scores. An additional part of the problem of this study was to determine the intervariable and composite relationships between the variables of self-concept, anxiety, reading achievement, reading coping strength, comprehension coping strength, IQ and grades.     

Parent-child cohesion,self-esteem,and academic achievement: The longitudinal relations among elementary school students

This study addressed the longitudinal reciprocal relations among parent-child cohesion, self-esteem, and academic achievement in elementary school students. A total of 659 students from Grades 4–5 in China (M_age = 10.09 years, 46.3% female) was investigated on five occasions across 12 months. The results indicated that: (a) For the direct reciprocal relations, mother-child cohesion and academic achievement reciprocally enhanced each other; self-esteem and academic achievement transactionally facilitated each other; father-child cohesion and self-esteem reciprocally enhanced each other; self-esteem facilitated mother-child cohesion, but not vice versa. (b) For the indirect relations, father-child cohesion and students’ academic achievement facilitated each other indirectly via self-esteem; students’ academic achievement influenced mother-child cohesion indirectly via self-esteem, but not vice versa. These results delineated the dynamic system among these study variables, and also revealed that father-child cohesion and mother-child cohesion showed both similarities and differences. Implications for educational practices were discussed.     

A longitudinal study of the predictive validity of the system of multicultural pluralstic assessment (SOMPA)

The System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment (SOMPA) was initially administered to 700 Anglo, 700 Black, and 700 Hispanic children in California elementary schools in order to develop a nonbiased testing program. Ten years later, 1184 of the original 2100 youths were again tested with the SOMPA in high school. At that time, academic achievement and parental interview data also were collected. The results indicate that: (a) Mean achievement test scores and GPAs for the high school students showed that Anglos obtained higher scores than Hispanics, who received higher scores than Blacks. (b) Among the various medical measures, the Bender Gestalt, Fine Motor Sequencing and Finger-Tongue Dexterity tests of the SOMPA were the only ones able to consistently differentiate between youth who did poorly and those who did well academically ten years after their initial testing. (c) Scores on the 1972 IQ test (WISC-R) showed moderate correlations with achievement test scores ten years later. (d) 1972 IQ scores showed low but reliable correlations with GPAs ten years later. (e) In only a very few instances were IQ correlations with achievement test scores higher for minorities than for Anglos. (f) IQ correlated less well with GPA than with achievement test scores for all three ethnic groups. (g) An adjusted IQ, called Estimated Learning Potential (ELP), was more predictive of school achievement than was verbal IQ, particularly for Blacks in the lowest sociocultural quartile. (h) In the second lowest sociocultural quartile, the VIQ correlations with academic measures were reliably higher than the VIQ-ELP correlations, but only for the Anglo and total groups. (i) In the upper two sociocultural quartiles, for all ethnic groups combined, VIQ correlated slightly, but significantly, higher than ELP with school achievement. (j) Also in the upper two quartiles, VIQ correlated higher with academic measures than did VIQ-ELP for both Blacks and Hispanics in almost half of the comparisons. In conclusion, it appears that some subtests of the SOMPA may have some validity for predicting school achievement for students from different ethnic groups.     

Gender-specific trajectories of academic achievement in Chinese elementary school students: Relations with life satisfaction trajectories and suicidal ideation trajectories

This study explored heterogeneous developmental trajectories of academic achievement and their relations to trajectories of life satisfaction and trajectories of suicidal ideation among Chinese elementary school students. A sample of 547 students (55.0% boys; M_age = 9.00 years, SD = 0.76 at Time 1) completed a packet of measures on five occasions across two years, using 6-month intervals. Three distinct trajectories of academic achievement were identified: “high-stable” (86.28%), “low-increasing” (8.94%), and “low-decreasing” (4.78%). Girls demonstrated higher academic achievement than boys. Students displaying adverse developmental trends in academic achievement were more likely to show adverse trends in life satisfaction. Finally, trajectories of academic achievement and trajectories of suicidal ideation were related for girls, but not boys. Programs promoting academic achievement may require adaptations for the differing genders and start as early as elementary school.     

The effects of the cooperative learning method supported by multiple intelligence theory on Turkish elementary students’ mathematics achievement

In the present experimental study, the effects of the cooperative learning method supported by multiple intelligence theory (CLMI) on elementary school fourth grade students’ academic achievement and retention towards the mathematics course were investigated. The participants of the study were 150 students who were divided into two experimental (used CLMI) and two control groups (used traditional method). “Mathematics Achievement Test,” “Teele Inventory for Multiple Intelligences” and “Personal Information Form” were used as the measurement instruments of the study. The findings of this research have indicated that CLMI has a more significant effect on academic achievement than the traditional method. Yet, regarding the retention scores, CLMI has not significant effect on retention.     

Attention problems,phonological short-term memory,and visuospatial short-term memory: Differential effects on near- and long-term scholastic achievement

The current study examined individual differences in children's phonological and visuospatial short-term memory as potential mediators of the relationship among attention problems and near- and long-term scholastic achievement. Nested structural equation models revealed that teacher-reported attention problems were associated negatively with composite scholastic achievement (reading, math, language), both initially and at 4-year follow-up in an ethnically diverse sample of children (N = 317). Much of this influence, however, was attenuated by phonological short-term memory's contribution to near-term achievement and visuospatial short-term memory's contribution to long-term achievement. Domain-specific reading and math models showed similar results with some exceptions. In all models, measured intelligence made no contribution to later achievement beyond its initial influence on early achievement. The results contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms associated with individual differences in children's scholastic achievement, and have potential implications for identifying early predictors of children at risk for academic failure, and developing remedial programs targeting phonological and visuospatial short-term memory deficits in children with attention problems.     

IQ and neuropsychological predictors of academic achievement

Word reading and math computation scores were predicted from Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence Full Scale IQ, 10 neuropsychological tests, and parent attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) ratings in 214 general population elementary school children. IQ was the best single predictor of achievement. In addition, Digit Span contributed significantly to reading prediction, and the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI) and Coding contributed to math prediction. The remaining neuropsychological test scores did not significantly improve achievement prediction. Exploratory factor analysis yielded a general ability factor (comprising the four IQ subtests, Digit Span, VMI, reading, and math), five factors made up solely of subtests from single measures (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Color and Word Test, Gordon Diagnostic System, California Verbal Learning Test, and ADHD ratings), a factor consisting of Grooved Pegboard Test and Coding, and a factor consisting of Symbol Search and Animal Naming Test.     

Self-concept differences in student teachers in primary,elementary, secondary,and special education

Self-concept, intelligence and academic achievement were examined in students preparing to teach in primary, elementary, secondary, and special education (N = 267). The measures were the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, a group intelligence test, and school grades. Differences in self-concept, but not in intelligence and academic achievement, were found among groups of student teachers. Secondary education majors reported a more positive self-concept than primary or elementary, with special education majors reporting the least positive self-concept of all.     

Creative and playful learning on technology-enriched playgrounds: an international investigation

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to determine the degree that creative and playful learning (CPL) in a technology-enriched playground influences academic achievement of students and what factors are responsible for successes. The participants were 276 students from 12 elementary classrooms in the Netherlands and Finland. The research used a pretest–posttest, without control design. The dependent variable was academic achievement on teacher-created tests; the independent variable was participation in the intervention; and the control variables were pretest scores, gender, academic subjects previously studied, age, satisfaction with schooling, country of the school, and classroom within the school. The results showed that there were significant gains in academic achievement and that the pretest was the only significant predictor of posttest achievement. Other variables, including gender, academic subjects studied, age, satisfaction with schooling, country of school, and classroom, were not statistically significant predictors of posttest scores. While students’ academic achievements are only one measure of progress in the current debate about learning in the education system, this article provides insight on education through analyses of the relationships among the integration of curriculum-based learning, CPL practices, and outdoor playgrounds.     

Comparative functions of preschool learning style and IQ in predicting future academic performance

Early assessment programs frequently rely on intelligence tests for making predictions regarding children's future school performance. Unfortunately, IQ scores provide little information to those who must develop educational interventions tailored to the unique ways in which children respond to learning situations. Alternatively, measures of children's learning style focus on distinct patterns of learning-related behavior manifested in classroom settings. Each dimension of learning style is composed of observable skills that are potentially teachable or alterable through available instructional procedures. In order to examine the relative contributions of learning style dimensions, IQ, and their interactions to the prediction of subsequent performance, 100 kindergarten children were evaluated by teachers using the Study of Children's Learning Styles scale and were administered the Kuhlmann-Anderson Intelligence Test. Fifteen months later the children's first-grade achievement was determined through standardized tests and teacher-assigned grades in reading, language, and mathematics. Relationships between the predictor and criterion variables were studied through patterns of bivariate correlations, canonical variate loadings, and standardized regression weights. Although IQ was found the better predictor, learning styles accounted for appreciable and statistically significant proportions of the variability in later achievement. The learning style dimensions functioned differentially across areas of achievement to enhance overall prediction either by complementing or interacting with the predictions afforded by IQ. The results are examined in the light of earlier research on learning-related behavior.     

Predictive validity of the WPPSI-R: A four year follow-up study

Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) scores obtained prior to enrollment in kindergarten are used to predict academic achievement scores on the Comprehensive Testing Program III at the end of grades 1, 2, and 3. Correlations between achievement and Verbal IQ are significant at all three grade levels, with measures of vocabulary, general knowledge, and verbal concept formation (Similarities) being the most consistent verbal predictors of academic achievement. Performance IQ is a poor predictor of academic achievement, with only 3 out of 16 correlations with achievement reaching significance. The Full Scale IQ's correlations with achievement appear to be due to the contributions of the verbal scale. Results are discussed in terms of their generalizability for this middle- and upper-middle-class sample engaged in a demanding academically-oriented curriculum.     

Third graders' performance predictions: calibration deflections and academic success

This study focuses on third grade pupils' (9 to 10 years old) ability to predict their performance in a given task and on the correspondence between the accuracy and adequacy of the predictions on the one hand, and the academic achievement on the other. The study involved 713 pupils from 29 Estonian schools. The pupils' performance predictions about a short-term memory recognition task and their actual scores were used to specify differences in prediction errors and the correspondence of these errors with academic achievement. In line with earlier research, the results indicate that low performers often overestimated themselves and their predictions tended to be most inaccurate, whereas high performers were more accurate although they often underestimated their performance. Pupils with lower academic achievement often provided extensive overestimations of the memory task. Underestimations, together with better accuracy, characterised children with a higher achievement level. This can indicate a meaningful accord between specific prediction errors and broader achievement at school.     

The relationships between first name desirability and school readiness,IQ, and school achievement

The relationships between first name desirability and school readiness, IQ, and school achievement were explored using 1,727 elementary school children. Ratings of the desirability of first names were completed by 2,212 boys and girls in elementary and secondary schools. School readiness, IQ, and achievement variables showed small, but significant, correlations with first name desirability for girls; boys also showed a first name effect, but the magnitude was less. Most correlations remained significant even when the effects of parental education and ethnicity were partialled out. First name desirability was discussed as a specific case of stereotyping.