Articlegreen2016

Genetically-mediated associations between measures of childhood character and academic achievement.

Elliot M. Tucker–Drob · Daniel A. Briley · Laura E. Engelhardt · Frank D. Mann · K. Paige Harden

139 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Personality and Social Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

Grit, Self-Efficacy, and Motivation Education, Achievement, and Giftedness Personality Traits and Psychology

Abstract

Researchers and the general public have become increasingly intrigued by the roles that systematic tendencies toward thinking, feeling, and behaving might play in academic achievement. Some measures of constructs belonging to this group have been well studied in genetics and psychometrics, while much less is known about measures of other such constructs. The current study focuses on 7 character traits prominently featured in influential intervention-oriented and/or socialization theories of academic achievement: grit, intellectual curiosity, intellectual self-concept, mastery orientation, educational value, intelligence mindset, and test motivation. In a population-based sample of 811 school-aged twins and triplets from the Texas Twin Project, we tested (a) how each measure relates to indices of the Big Five personality traits, (b) how the measures relate to one another, (c) the extent to which each measure is associated with genetic and environmental influences and whether such influences operate through common dimensions of individual differences, and (d) the extent to which genetic and environmental factors mediate the relations between fluid intelligence, character measures, verbal knowledge, and academic achievement. We find moderate relations among the measures that can be captured by a highly heritable common dimension representing a mixture of Openness and Conscientiousness. Moreover, genetically influenced variance in the character measures is associated with multiple measures of verbal knowledge and academic achievement, even after controlling for fluid intelligence. In contrast, environmentally influenced variance in character is largely unrelated to knowledge and achievement outcomes. We propose that character measures popularly used in education may be best conceptualized as indexing facets of personality that are of particular relevance to academic achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 139 citations exist upstream.

References

1955Construct validity in psychological tests.1988A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality.2006Mindset: the new psychology of success 2000Expectancy–Value Theory of Achievement Motivation 2007Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals.1990An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure.1999Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development 2011A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety

Cited by

2018“Same but different”: Associations between multiple aspects of self-regulation, cognition, and academic abilities.2019Reciprocal relations between grit and academic achievement: A longitudinal study 2018Neuroanatomical correlates of grit: Growth mindset mediates the association between gray matter structure and trait grit in late adolescence 2017Development of the grit scale for children and adults and its relation to student efficacy, test anxiety, and academic performance 2016Strong genetic overlap between executive functions and intelligence.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.