No abstract

Transition to university is a multifactorial process to which scarce consideration has been given in Spain, despite this being one of the countries with the highest rates of academic failure and attrition within the European Union. The present study proposes an empirical model for predicting Spanish students' academic achievement at university by considering pre-entry characteristics, perceived social support and adaptation to university, in a sample of 300 traditional first-year university students. The findings of the path analysis showed that pre-university achievement and academic and personal-emotional adjustment were direct predictors of academic achievement. Furthermore, gender, parents' education and family support were indirect predictors of academic achievement, mediated by pre-university grades and adjustment to university. The current findings supporting evidence that academic achievement in first-year Spanish students is the cumulative effect of pre-entry characteristics and process variables, key factors that should be taken into account in designing intervention strategies involving families and that establish stronger links between research findings and university policies.

Little is known about how binge drinking or the combination of binge drinking and cannabis consumption affect academic achievement in students during the transition to university, or about the mechanisms that mediate this relationship. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between this pattern of alcohol/cannabis consumption and academic achievement, considering academic adjustment as a possible mediator. A total of 258 Spanish, first-year university students (145 females and 113 males), enrolled in undergraduate degree courses, were categorized into three groups on the basis of their patterns of alcohol/cannabis consumption: control, binge drinkers and co-consumers. The findings showed a significant effect of the combined binge drinking/cannabis consumption, but not of binge drinking alone, upon academic achievement and academic adjustment. Grade point average (GPA) and academic adjustment were lower in the co-consumers than in the other groups. Regarding the mediation effect, 34.33% of the impact of combined alcohol/cannabis use on GPA was mediated by academic adjustment. The combined consumption of alcohol and cannabis led to difficulties in adaptation to academic life, which in turn contributed to poorer performance at university. The implications of the findings are discussed.

The main purpose of this study was to adapt the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) for use with Spanish students and to examine the psychometric properties of the scores. The adapted version of the scale was applied to a sample of 300 first-year university students. The internal consistency of the full scale and of the subscales was adequate, although the structure of the scale, analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis, did not fit satisfactorily to the four-factor model proposed by Baker and Siryk. The goodness of fit of each of four one-factor models, corresponding to each subscale, was tested separately in order to propose a short form of the scale. The resulting scale, comprising 50 items, shows high internal consistency and the relationships between its dimensions are consistent with those obtained in other studies.

Elderly people experience more failures in word form access (tip-of-the-tongue events, 'TOTs') than young people. There is general agreement that TOTs are signs of cognitive decline in older people, but because of the diversity and ambiguity involved in measuring TOTs, certain questions regarding age-related trends in semantic access remain unsolved. Age-related increases in vocabulary may raise the level of efficiency of access to semantic representations and compensate for lexical access failures. We explore the relationships between lexical knowledge and lexical retrieval in ageing by re-examining the data obtained by Juncos-Rabadán et al. on TOTs induced in 140 volunteers aged from 19 to 82 years. We found that older adults displayed significantly more difficulty in accessing the phonological representations of personal names, but not those of common nouns. The results revealed greater semantic access efficiency in older participants. We discuss the findings in light of the transmission deficit theory of TOT production.