Need for cognition in children and adolescents: Behavioral correlates and relations to academic achievement and potential

Luong, Cäcilia; Strobel, Anja; Wollschläger, Rachel; Greiff, Samuel; Vainikainen, Mari–Pauliina; Preckel, Franzis

doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2016.10.019

Cited by 57 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…With regard to the present study, and previous studies, it seems reasonable to assume that individuals with higher NFC will outperform individuals with lower NFC on school tasks requiring a lot of thinking, such as mathematical problem solving, reading comprehension, and natural science issues, but not on tasks that are less effortful (Leone and Dalton, 1988). In a recent publication (Luong et al, 2017) it was shown that the association between NFC and academic achievement increases from grade 3 to grade 9. To the extent that NFC is important already at elementary school level (or even earlier) and that NFC is regarded as a trait-based characteristic a question arises; is it possible to encourage and improve NFC in an early age and maintain this disposition over the school years?…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 45%

Assessing the Willingness to Elaborate among Young Students: Psychometric Evaluation of a Swedish Need for Cognition Scale

Stenlund

Jonsson

2017

Front. Educ.

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The personality trait Need for Cognition (NFC) has been studied for many years and found to be important for individuals' educational achievement. The original NFC-scale was developed in the eighties, and during the following decade the scale was translated and adapted into a number of other languages. A renewed interest for the personality trait of NFC has made these scales interesting to use. It is though vital that instruments used for studies of individual differences in the area of educational research, or in any other area, can portray valid results today. The aim of the present paper was to evaluate validity and reliability of the short version of the Mental Effort Tolerance Questionnaire, a Swedish adaption of the NFC-scale made in 1991, which has not been previously evaluated. This study involved 420 young students, and the evaluation of reliability includes a study of temporal stability (test-retest), as well as internal stability. Further, the evaluation of validity includes construct and criterion validity. Regarding reliability, the results showed a test-retest reliability coefficient of 0.88 (n = 108) and an internal stability (Cronbach's alpha) of 0.88 (n = 420). Evaluation of construct validity found evidence for a five factor dimensional structure (n = 420), discriminant validity to measures of general intelligence (r = 0.25; n = 122), working memory (r = 0.22; n = 164), and the personality trait Grit (r = 0.26; n = 169). Finally, criterion validity was found for grades (r = 0.35; n = 125). Overall, the results of the evaluation show that the inferences made from the results of the short version of the Swedish NFC-scale exhibits satisfactory reliability and validity, suggesting that the questionnaire can be used in educational contexts. The questionnaire might, however, benefit from being even more shortened.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 45%

Assessing the Willingness to Elaborate among Young Students: Psychometric Evaluation of a Swedish Need for Cognition Scale

Stenlund

Jonsson

2017

Front. Educ.

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“…Previous studies have shown that NFC acts as a positive predictor of individual academic achievement and work performance by promoting intrinsic motivation for the pursuit of knowledge and extensive cognitive processing (Grass et al, ; Luong et al, ; Neigel et al, ; Weissgerber et al, ; Wu et al, ). We extended existing research and found that NFC showed a positive correlation with creative achievement, which further confirmed the close relationship between NFC and creativity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Creative achievement, a more ecologically valid measure of creativity, has been regarded as the sum of creative accomplishments achieved by an individual during his or her lifetime, which reflects longterm creative behaviors and may be used as a comprehensive indicator to assess individual differences in creative performance in daily life (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005;Chen et al, 2014). To our knowledge, although there is considerable empirical evidence that supports NFC as a powerful predictor of academic achievement (Bertrams & Dickhaeuser, 2009;Grass et al, 2017;Luong et al, 2017;Neigel, Behairy, & Szalma, 2017;Weissgerber, Reinhard, & Schindler, 2018) and one study showed that NFC is correlated with everyday creative behavior (Dollinger, 2003), no research has directly examined the relationship between NFC and creative achievement. Here, we tested the relationship between NFC and creative achievement in the sciences and arts and further explored whether brain flexibility associated with NFC facilitated creative achievement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Zhuang

Liu

et al. 2019

Psychophysiology

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Advances in graph‐theoretic models of networks have made it possible to investigate the topological properties of the human brain across time and space. Brain flexibility is defined as the frequency with which brain regions switch between different functional modules over time and has been shown to correlate with higher‐order cognitive functions. Need for cognition (NFC) refers to a personality trait to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors and usually has a positive effect on diverse cognitive activities (e.g., creativity), which may also be closely related to brain flexibility. Here, we tested whether the flexibility of a large‐scale brain network associated with NFC facilitated creative achievement. Robust correlation analyses showed that NFC correlates with the flexibility of the insula, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the putamen at the node level. Several large‐scale brain networks whose flexibility also correlated with NFC, including the default mode network, salience network, subcortical network, ventral attention network, and control network, imply that higher NFC individuals may exhibit better cognitive abilities, such as executive control, salient detection, spontaneous thought, and motivation function. Interestingly, only global flexibility acted as a mediator in the relationship between NFC and creative achievement, suggesting that the mediating mechanism may involve an interaction between distinct regions or large‐scale networks across the entire brain instead of the functional characteristic of local regions. Together, we demonstrate that the higher NFC is, the more flexible the brain, which may provide a potential insight into the acquisition of creative achievement.

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“…They are more likely to solve complex problems or tasks (Coutinho 2006;Coutinho et al 2005;Nair and Ramnarayan 2000) and they perform better on learning tests (Heijne-Penninga et al 2010;Sadowski and Gülgöz 1996). Consequently, individual differences in NFC are associated with academic achievement (Luong et al 2017). High NFC was found to be associated with course achievements (Bertrams and Dickhäuser 2009;Sadowski and Gülgöz 1996), university GPA (grade point average) (Grass et al 2017), course grades mediated by difficulty of learning material (Leone and Dalton 1988), and performance in exams mediated by self-regulated learning and deep information processing (Cazan and Indreica 2004).…”

Section: Need For Cognition and The Generation Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effectiveness of Self-Generation During Learning is Dependent on Individual Differences in Need for Cognition.

Schindler

Reinhard

2019

FLR

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Self-generated information is better recognized and recalled than read information. This so-called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of stimulus material, different generation tasks, and retention intervals. The present study investigated the impact of individual differences in learners' disposition to engage in effortful cognitive activities (need for cognition, NFC) on the effectiveness of selfgeneration during learning. Learners low in NFC usually avoid getting engaged in cognitively demanding activities. However, if these learners are explicitly instructed to use elaborate learning strategies such as self-generation, they should benefit more from such strategies than learners high in NFC, because self-generation stimulates cognitive processes that learners low in NFC usually tend not to engage in spontaneously. Using a classical word-generation paradigm, we not only replicated the generation effect in free and cued recall but showed that the magnitude of the generation effect increased with decreasing NFC in cued recall. Results are consistent with our assumption that learners higher in NFC engage in elaborate processing even without explicit instruction, whereas learners lower in NFC usually avoid cognitively demanding activities. These learners need cognitively demanding tasks that require them to switch from shallow to elaborate processing to improve learning. We conclude that selfgeneration is beneficial regardless of the NFC level, but our study extends the existing literature on the generation effect and on NFC by showing that self-generation can be particularly useful for balancing the learning disadvantage of students lower in NFC.

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Need for cognition in children and adolescents: Behavioral correlates and relations to academic achievement and potential

Cited by 57 publications

References 43 publications

Assessing the Willingness to Elaborate among Young Students: Psychometric Evaluation of a Swedish Need for Cognition Scale

Assessing the Willingness to Elaborate among Young Students: Psychometric Evaluation of a Swedish Need for Cognition Scale

Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Effectiveness of Self-Generation During Learning is Dependent on Individual Differences in Need for Cognition.

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