School engagement and school climate of students with high and low grade point averages

For adolescents, school life and learning is one of the most important domains of their lives. School achievement, depending on whether it is high or low, can motivate students to learn or make them reluctant to engage in school learning. Students' engagement in learning is closely related to their perceived school climate. The present study set out to investigate how these two variables distinguish between groups of students with high and low grade point averages. The participants in this study were students from secondary schools from among whom the students with the lowest and the highest grade point average were selected. It is found that students with higher grade point average are more engaged in learning and perceive their school climate as more positive than students with low grade point average.

Definitional Skills as a Bridge towards School Achievement

The general aim of the current study was to investigate the role of definitional skills in promoting primary school achievement (third- to fifth graders) and how school learning may shape definitional skills. Marks from four school subjects, linguistic (Italian and English) and scientific (Math and Science) were collected as well as scores in a Definitional Task. These two domains were chosen as they clearly entail the two different definition types, that is, lexicographic and scientific. Results indicated that scientific school subject marks are more predictive of definitional skills than linguistic school marks are. The opposite direction (i.e., how definitional skills are predictive of school achievement) appears less clear. In sum, the results, although preliminary, suggest that definitional skills represent a bridge towards school achievement as they promote good marks in all disciplines. Moreover, definitional skills are predicted from levels of competence acquired especially in scientific school subjects that request a higher degree of formal/organized learning. It is then of primary importance to promote interaction–integration between these two kinds of concepts via formal schooling.

Developmental behavioral genetics research on school achievement is missing vulnerable children, to our detriment

Gene–environment processes tell us how genes and environments work together to influence children in schools. One type of gene–environment process that has been extensively studied using behavioral genetics methods is a gene-by-environment interaction. A gene-by-environment interaction shows us when the effect of your context differs depending on your genes, or vice versa, when the effect of your genes differs depending on your context. Developmental behavioral geneticists interested in children’s school achievement have examined many different contexts within the gene-by-environment interaction model, including contexts measured from within children’s home and school environments. However, this work has been overwhelmingly focused on White children, leaving us with non-inclusive scientific evidence. This can lead to detrimental outcomes when we overgeneralize this non-inclusive scientific evidence to racialized groups. We conclude with a call to include racialized children in more research samples.

The Role of Procrastination and Locus of Control in School Achievement

Numerous studies are focused on discovering the factors involved in achieving school success or failure. Among the recognized factors are certainly the locus of control and procrastination. Research has shown that procrastination and locus of control are important indicators of school behavior, attitudes toward obligations, and indicators of school success (Sakač 2008; Košanski 2004). Therefore, this paper sought to determine the extent to which they play an important role in school success. The increasing interest in examining school success lies in being assessed as a significant factor in a child’s life. Its significance influences the development of self-confidence, satisfaction, success, and motivation. Within the research framework, school success was determined by school achievement at the end of the school year. The survey was conducted on 100 respondents of elementary school students, a sample is appropriate. During this research, the relationships between these variables were analyzed, the Anova procedure was used to analyze the data. The obtained results showed that procrastination and locus of control within this sample did not prove to be significant factors of school success.

Socio-Emotional Skills and the Rich-Poor Learning Gap

Empirical evidence suggests that children's socio-emotional skills—an important determinant of school achievement—vary by socio-economic family background. In this study, we assessed the degree to which differences in socio-emotional skills contribute to the achievement gap between rich and poor children. We used data on 74 countries from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which contains an extensive set of psychological measures, including growth mindset, self-efficacy, and work mastery. We developed three conceptual scenarios to analyze the role of socio-emotional skills in learning inequality: simple accumulation, multiplicative accumulation, and compensatory accumulation. Our findings are in line with the simple accumulation scenario: rich children have somewhat higher levels of socio-emotional skills than poor children, but the effect of these skills on academic performance is largely similar for both groups. Using a counterfactual decomposition method, we show that socio-emotional skills explain no more than 8.8% of the rich-poor achievement gap. Based on these findings, we argue that initiatives to promote social and emotional learning (SEL) are unlikely to substantially reduce educational inequalities.

School Does Not Kill Creativity

Based on meta-analyses, intervention studies, and investigations outside of the creativity literature, this paper makes seven evidence-informed propositions about the relationships between creativity and school functioning. First, creative abilities are drivers, not brakes of school achievement. Second, the negative attitudes toward creative students sometimes observed in schools usually concern a small and particular group of creative students: those who are most impulsive and nonconforming. Third, creativity-relevant mental processes support learning. Fourth, creative learning occurs when students can co-discover new, meaningful knowledge. Fifth, school education supports – albeit likely to a different degree – both intelligence and creativity. Sixth, both creative and learning processes are most effective when accompanied by agency and value: feeling confident and valuing creativity and learning are instrumental for generating and directing motivation. Seventh, in both creativity and learning processes, self-regulation is vital.

When School Comes to Community: Considering the Socioethnic Environment in Educational Reform for Gypsy Populations in a French City

In this paper, I explore the dynamics of an educational reform aimed at transforming individual and collective attitudes towards school among Gypsy/Roma families living in urban spaces of advanced social marginality. In Perpignan, Gypsy/Roma people are highly marginalized, living in a deprived urban environment (violence, unemployment, poor housing conditions, female-headed households, problematic night life) and following their cultural and customary rules and values. These play a crucial role in weak school performance. In 2005, city riots pushed municipal, community, and educational stakeholders to act. Policymakers implemented an experimental national policy in Perpignan from 2007 to 2015, in which they treated education as the cornerstone of necessary change. This public policy opened schools to their social and ethnic environment, as socioenvironmental settings were utilized as a performative tool for school achievement and success.

Intelligence Can Be Used to Make a More Equitable Society but Only When Properly Defined and Applied

In the US, undeniable evidence shows that socioeconomic inequities explain a high proportion of individual differences in school achievement. Although not all countries show this same effect due to socioeconomic status, it is consistently found that social inequities lead to achievement gaps. These achievement gaps then manifest into trajectories that set some individuals on a path of lower incomes, poorer health and higher mortality, lower wellbeing, and other poor adult outcomes. Like James Flynn so handily reminded the scientific literature that achievement gaps are explainable by environmental factors, the inequities we see around the world are based on environments some children are exposed to. In his work, Flynn stated his belief that the suppression of scientific work on intelligence would continue to lead to social inequities. We wish to take this idea and move it forward. We believe that the scientific construct of intelligence plays a key role in helping create a more equitable society through science. We also believe that the poor perception of intelligence, rooted in historical realities, means that it will continue to be misunderstood, feared, and misused, limiting how effective it could be in helping to close gaps in achievement and in creating a more equitable society.