Non-cognitive factors of educational achievement: motivation and anxiety

Educational achievement has traditionally been closely associated with general cognitive ability (g). Although g explains a substantial portion of variance in educational attainment, several non-cognitive factors have been found to relate to achievement beyond g. The present thesis focuses on exploring the association between achievement and two such factors: motivation and anxiety. The five empirical chapters included in the present thesis address several questions regarding the relation between motivation, anxiety and achievement, which to date remained unexplored. The present thesis includes data from two samples: the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), a large-scale developmental twin sample from the United Kingdom (UK), and a sample of students attending the first year of secondary school in the UK, who contributed data longitudinally. The results showed that academic anxiety and motivation are domain-specific constructs. This observed domain-specificity of motivation and anxiety was also found to apply to their association with academic achievement. Motivation and anxiety constructs were moderately heritable, and the remaining variance explained by nonshared, individual specific, environmental influences. The cross-sectional and longitudinal links between motivation, anxiety and achievement were largely due to genetic influences common to all measures within a specific academic domain. The present thesis also explored the directionality of effects in the longitudinal associations between educational achievement and motivation; partly supporting the view of reciprocal links between the two constructs in several academic domains. However, a reciprocal relation between motivation and achievement was not observed in the domain of second language in a sample of naïve learners. The results of the present thesis have important implication for future research and practice. For example, it is argued that future interventions aimed at reducing the academic anxiety should consider three main factors: (1) its domain specific; (2) the directionality of effects in its association with achievement; (3) possible factors moderating or mediating the association between anxiety and achievement (i.e. motivation)

The developmental interplay between the p-factor of psychopathology and the g-factor of intelligence from age 7 through 16 years

Intelligence and mental health are the core pillars of individual adaptation, growth, and opportunity. Here, we charted across childhood and adolescence the developmental interplay between the p-factor of psychopathology, which captures the experience of symptoms across the spectrum of psychiatric disorders, and the g-factor of general intelligence that describes the ability to think, reason, and learn.Our preregistered analyses included 7,433 twin pairs from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), who were born 1994 to 1996 in England and Wales. At the ages 7, 9, 12, and 16 years, the twins completed two to four intelligence tests, and multi-informant measures (i.e., self-, parent- and teacher-rated) of psychopathology were collected.Independent of their cross-sectional correlations, p- and g-factors were linked by consistent, bidirectional, and negative cross-lagged paths across childhood and adolescence (from -.07 to -.13 with 95% CIs from -.03 to -.15). The cross-lagged paths from intelligence to psychopathology were largely due to genetic influences, but the paths from psychopathology to intelligence were driven by environmental factors, and increasingly so with age.Our findings suggest that intelligence and psychopathology are developmentally intertwined due to fluctuating etiological processes. Understanding the interplay of g- and p-factors is key for improving children's developmental outcomes

Reciprocal Effects Between Negative Parenting and Children's Callous-Unemotional Traits From Mid to Late Childhood

OBJECTIVE: The role of negative parenting in the development of callous-unemotional (CU) traits remains unclear. Both negative parenting and CU traits are influenced by genetic and environmental factors. The authors used genetically informed longitudinal cross-lagged models to examine the extent to which reciprocal effects between negative parenting and children's CU traits in mid-to-late childhood are genetic versus environmental in origin. METHODS: In 9,260 twin pairs from the Twins Early Development Study, the authors estimated cross-lagged effects between negative parenting (discipline and feelings) and children's CU traits in mid (ages 7-9) and late (ages 9-12) childhood. RESULTS: CU traits were strongly heritable and stable. Stability was explained largely by genetic factors. The influence of negative parenting on the development of CU traits was small and driven mostly by genetic and shared environmental factors. In mid childhood, the influence of children's CU traits on subsequent negative parenting (i.e., evoked by children's CU traits) was also small and mostly genetic in origin. In late childhood, CU traits showed no effects on negative parental discipline and small effects on negative parental feelings, which reflected mostly shared environmental factors. CONCLUSIONS: In mid-to-late childhood, genetic factors strongly influenced the development of CU traits, whereas environmental effects of negative parenting were small. Negative parenting was also relatively unaffected by CU traits. The small reciprocal effects originated mostly from genetic and shared environmental factors. Therefore, repeated intensive interventions addressing multiple risk factors rather than negative parenting alone may be best positioned to support families of children with CU traits across development

Creative Storytelling in Childhood is Related to Exam Performance at Age 16

Creativity is only partly recognised in education. A recent meta-analysis estimated a correlation of r = 0.22 between creativity and educational achievement across many international student samples of all educational levels. In the meta-analysis, creativity was measured with a variety of measures, including divergent thinking and remote association tasks. The differences in the measures influenced the strength of the relationship between creativity and educational achievement. More research is needed to establish reliable measures of creativity, especially in primary school children, whose creativity remains poorly evaluated. The present study measured creativity in written stories in children at age 9 using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT). The study employed a longitudinal design, using CAT creativity scores as a predictor of educational achievement at age 16. Each of the stories from 59 children were coded by 6 different judges for 10 dimensions, including creativity. The inter-rater reliabilities between the judges for the 10 dimensions were high (α = .76 - .95). Among the dimensions, a factor analysis revealed two factors: Creative Expressiveness and Logic. The Creative Expressiveness factor explained an additional 7 % of variance in English grades, but not in Maths, beyond intelligence, previous achievement and personality traits associated with creativity. Overall, the study showed that CAT is a robust and reliable measure to detect verbal creativity in childhood. The results also suggest that early creativity predicts later academic achievement, calling for more attention to early creativity assessment and development

Genetic factors underlie the association between anxiety, attitudes and performance in mathematics

Students struggling with mathematics anxiety (MA) tend to show lower levels of mathematics self-efficacy and interest as well as lower performance. The current study addresses: (1) how MA relates to different aspects of mathematics attitudes (self-efficacy and interest), ability (understanding numbers, problem solving ability, and approximate number sense) and achievement (exam scores); (2) to what extent these observed relations are explained by overlapping genetic and environmental factors; and (3) the role of general anxiety in accounting for these associations. The sample comprised 3,410 twin pairs aged 16-21 years, from the Twins Early Development Study. Negative associations of comparable strength emerged between MA and the two measures of mathematics attitudes, phenotypically (~ -.45) and genetically (~ -.70). Moderate negative phenotypic (~ -.35) and strong genetic (~ -.70) associations were observed between MA and measures of mathematics performance. The only exception was approximate number sense whose phenotypic (-.10) and genetic (-.31) relation with MA was weaker. Multivariate quantitative genetic analyses indicated that all mathematics related measures combined accounted for ~75% of the genetic variance in MA and ~20% of its environmental variance. Genetic effects were largely shared across all measures of mathematics anxiety, attitudes, abilities and achievement, with the exception of approximate number sense. This genetic overlap was not accounted for by general anxiety. These results have important implications for future genetic research concerned with identifying the genetic underpinnings of individual variation in mathematics-related traits, as well as for developmental research into how children select and modify their mathematics-related experiences partly based on their genetic predispositions

Gene-environment correlation:The role of family environment in academic development

Academic achievement is partly heritable and highly polygenic. However, genetic effects on academic achievement are not independent of environmental processes. We investigated whether aspects of the family environment mediated genetic effects on academic achievement across development. Our sample included 5151 children who participated in the Twins Early Development Study, as well as their parents and teachers. Data on academic achievement and family environments (parenting, home environments, and geocoded indices of neighbourhood characteristics) were available at ages 7, 9, 12 and 16. We computed educational attainment polygenic scores (PGS) and further separated genetic effects into cognitive and noncognitive PGS. Three core findings emerged. First, aspects of the family environment, but not the wider neighbourhood context, consistently mediated the PGS effects on achievement across development—accounting for up to 34.3% of the total effect. Family characteristics mattered beyond socio-economic status. Second, family environments were more robustly linked to noncognitive PGS effects on academic achievement than cognitive PGS effects. Third, when we investigated whether environmental mediation effects could also be observed when considering differences between siblings, adjusting for family fixed effects, we found that environmental mediation was nearly exclusively observed between families. This is consistent with the proposition that family environmental contexts contribute to academic development via passive gene-environment correlation processes or genetic nurture. Our results show how parents tend to shape environments that foster their children’s academic development partly based on their own genetic disposition, particularly towards noncognitive skills, rather than responding to each child’s genetic disposition

Assessing Creative Expressiveness in Children’s Written Stories Using the Consensual Assessment Technique

The study investigated methodological issues relating to the use of the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) for measuring creativity in children’s written stories. The CAT is a commonly used measure to estimate creativity of a product, based on social recognition of creativity by independent judges. Across domains, the CAT has shown high inter-rater reliability. The present study utilised the CAT to assess creativity in children’s written stories. The stories were also evaluated for: Imagination, Novelty, Liking (how much the judges liked the story), Detail, Emotion, Vocabulary, Straightforwardness, Logic and Grammar. The sample consisted of 277 nine-year-olds. The results showed that to reach sufficient inter-rater reliability, 5 coders were needed. The results gave evidence of a 2-factor structure among the 10 dimensions, indexing ‘Creative Expressiveness’ and ‘Logic’ constructs related to individual differences in writing. Girls outperformed boys on both constructs. The story length was positively correlated with the constructs, explaining 63% of the variance in Creative Expressiveness, and 42% in Logic. Creative Expressiveness was positively correlated with verbal ability (r = .20) and with teacher rating of writing (r = .28). Similarly, Logic was also correlated with verbal ability (r = .34) and teacher rating of writing (r = .44). The findings inform future research employing the CAT to measure creativity in children’s storytelling