Do Psychosocial and Study Skill Factors Predict College Outcomes? A Meta-Analysis.

Robbins, Steven B.; Lauver, Kristy J.; Le, Huy; Davis, Daniel Cochece; Langley, Ronelle; Carlstrom, Aaron H.

doi:10.1037/0033-2909.130.2.261

Cited by 1,837 publications

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“…The magnitude of the effect of intrinsic motivation coincides with the meta-analytic mean population correlation of 0.26 reported by Robbins et al (2004) and of 0.24 found by Vallerand et al (1993) in a comparable sample of 220 undergraduate college students. Intrinsic motivation also correlates significantly with four of the five specific academic achievement criteria in this study.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Predicting academic success in higher education: what’s more important than being smart?

2012

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This study investigated the combined predictive validity of intelligence and personality factors on multiple measures of academic achievement. Students in a college of higher education in the Netherlands (N0137) completed a survey that measured intelligence, the Big Five personality traits, motivation, and four specific personality traits. Student performance was measured with grade point average (GPA) and time to graduation, as well as with five specific performance measures: regular exams, skills training, team projects, internships, and a written thesis. Results show that 33% of the variance in GPA and 30% of the variance in time to graduation can be explained by combining intelligence, personality, and motivational predictors. Conscientiousness is the best predictor across a broad spectrum of academic achievement measures and explains five times as much variance in GPA as does intelligence. The practical implications are that institutes of higher education should collect personality data on students at the outset and then help students accordingly. Highly conscientious students who are organized and internally motivated might potentially be offered more challenging honours programs with corresponding special commendations on their diplomas, whereas students who score low on conscientious would receive more structure through student study groups, frequent deadlines, shorter assignments, group assignments, clearly defined learning goals, and less second chances for passing examinations.Keywords Academic success . Higher education . Intelligence . Motivation . Personality traits . Predictive validity Harris (1940) andCattell (1965) long ago noted the importance of personality factors for predicting academic achievement. Harris (1940) discussed the importance of persistence, in the guise of effort, and concluded that the essential factors for scholastic achievement were: Eur J Psychol Educ (2012) (a) ability, otherwise known as intelligence or scholastic aptitude, (b) effort, also known as drive or degree of motivation, and (c) personal, economic, social, and academic circumstances. Years later, Cattell (1965) suggested that, for university students who had already been selected on intelligence, personality and motivation would be just as important for predicting academic achievement. Recent research has shown that personality accounts for variance in academic achievement over and above intelligence (Bratko et al. 2006;Gilles and Bailleux 2001;Noftle and Robins 2007;Poropat 2009), and that personality may have even more predictive power than intelligence at the post-secondary levels of education (Conard 2006;Di Fabio and Busoni 2007;Furnham and Chamorro-Premuzic 2004;Furnham et al. 2003;Petrides et al. 2005).O 'Conner and Paunonen (2007) recently reviewed the studies concerning how well intelligence and personality factors predicted academic achievement at the post-secondary level and reiterated the earlier recommendations of Harris and Cattell. They offered a template for subsequent research and ca...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Predicting academic success in higher education: what’s more important than being smart?

2012

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“…All three measures have been found to explain unique variation in GPA (Bridgeman, Pollack & Burton, 2004;Ramist, Lewis & McCamley-Jenkins, 2001), collectively accounting for approximately 25% of the variance (Mathiasen, 1984;Mouw & Khanna, 1993;Robbins et al, 2004) so leaving substantial variance unexplained.…”

Section: Traditional Correlates Of Gpa: Sat Act Intelligence Highmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Zimmerman (1989) notes, self-regulated learners are "metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviourally active participants in their own learning process" (p.4). Consequently, models of academic performance may need to encompass expectancies, motivation, goals, and use of self-regulatory learning strategies (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002;Robbins et al, 2004). Unlike intelligence and personality, these predictors are malleable and context-sensitive (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1981;Wolters, Pintrich & Karabenick, 2003).…”

Section: Psychological Correlates Of Gpa: a Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most comprehensive by Robbins et al (2004) reviewed a range of motivational, skill and contextual factors. These authors found that achievement motivation, here referred to as effort regulation (Pintrich, 2004), and academic self-efficacy were the best predictors of GPA and that women students and those from higher socioeconomic status backgrounds attained high GPA scores.…”

Section: Which Correlates Of Gpa Are Most Important?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The latter review showed that the relationship between conscientiousness and academic performance was largely independent of intelligence and that when academic performance at secondary level (i.e., school) was controlled, conscientiousness added as much to the prediction of tertiary academic performance as did intelligence. Less stable tendencies including motivation, self-regulatory learning strategies and learning styles have also been found to predict academic performance, controlling for the effects of intelligence and personality (e.g., Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2008 and see Robbins, Lauver, Le, Davis, Langley, and Carlstrom, 2004 for a review).…”

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Psychological correlates of university students' academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Richardson

Abraham

Bond

2012

Psychological Bulletin

2,630

204

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A review of 13 years of research into antecedents of university students' grade point average scores (GPA) generated: (i) a comprehensive, conceptual map of known correlates of tertiary GPA, (ii) assessment of the magnitude of average, weighted correlations with GPA and (iii) tests of multivariate models of GPA correlates within and across research domains. A systematic search of psycINFO and web of knowledge databases between 1997 and 2010 identified 7167 English language articles yielding 242 datasets reporting 50 conceptuallydistinct correlates of GPA including 3 demographic factors and 5 traditional measures of cognitive capacity or prior academic performance. In addition, 42 non-intellective constructs were identified from 5 conceptually-overlapping but distinct research domains: (1) personality traits, (2) motivational factors, (3) self-regulatory learning strategies, (4) students' approaches to learning, and (5) psychosocial contextual influences. 1105 independent correlations were retrieved and data were analyzed using hypothesis-driven, random effects meta analyses. Significant average, weighted correlations were found for 41 of 50 measures.Univariate analyses revealed that demographic, and psychosocial contextual factors generated, at best, small correlations with GPA. Medium-sized correlations were observed for high school GPA, SAT, ACT, and 'A' level scores. Four non-intellective constructs also showed medium-sized correlations with GPA, namely, need for cognition, academic selfefficacy, grade goal, and effort regulation. A large correlation was observed for performance self-efficacy which was the strongest correlate (of 50 measures) followed by high school GPA, ACT, and grade goal. Implications for future research, student assessment and intervention design are discussed.Key terms: student, grade point average, self-efficacy, goal, meta analysis. NON INTELLECTIVE CORRELATES OF ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE 2The psychology of individual differences originated in attempts to predict scholastic performance. Binet and Simon's (1916) work showed that children's individual cognitive capacities explained variability in educational performance and, in doing so, laid the foundations for extensive research into intelligence and intelligence testing (Neisser et al., 1996). Theoretical debate focused on the psychological nature of intelligence and applied research explored how differences in intelligence(s) can be most usefully assessed (e.g., Capenter, Just & Shell, 1990; Gardner, 1983;Spearman, 1927). Subsequent research has identified a variety of individual differences that predict scholastic performance and prompted construction of a wide range of assessment instruments. This diverse literature has not clarified how, and to what extent, separate measures of academic potential are related.Greater conceptual and methodological integration would help focus future research questions and facilitate optimal assessment of students' academic potential. In order to achieve this we reviewed 13 years of research...

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Socio-emotional and Self-management Variables in Learning and Assessment

Kyllonen¹

2016

The Handbook of Cognition and Assessment

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Do Psychosocial and Study Skill Factors Predict College Outcomes? A Meta-Analysis.

Cited by 1,837 publications

References 135 publications

Predicting academic success in higher education: what’s more important than being smart?

Predicting academic success in higher education: what’s more important than being smart?

Psychological correlates of university students' academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Socio-emotional and Self-management Variables in Learning and Assessment

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