Browsing by Author "Jaalas, Anni"

Introduction. Cognitive performance and school engagement have been shown to affect school performance from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. Higher working memory performance and attentional skills can predict success in many different school subjects, such as math, English and science. Individual differences in executive attention have also been shown to predict the length of education from childhood to adulthood. Studies have also shown that motivational characteristics such as school engagement can predict school achievements and the years of schooling attained. Only a few studies have tried to investigate the joint effects that cognitive skills and motivational characteristics have on school performance. This study aims to examine how cognitive skills (working memory and attention) and school engagement jointly affect school performance in Finnish adolescent students. One aim was also to find out if school engagement mediates the connection between cognitive performance and school performance. Methods. The current study included 105 volunteering adolescents (53 females) who participated in the Mind the Gap (2012 – 2016) study that was funded by the Academy of Finland. The study included two age groups: 13–14 year olds (n=50) and 16–17 year olds (n=55). Participants performed tasks that measured working memory performance and executive attention and they filled out a questionnaire that included the school engagement inventory. School achievement was evaluated with both official grades and students self-assessed grades. Structural equation modelling was used to analyze the relationships between the examined variables. Results and conclusions. The study showed that both cognitive performance and school engagement predicted school performance. Especially the connections between self-assessed grades and cognitive performance and school engagement were more significant than connections with official grades. This study did not find a significant relationship between cognitive performance and school engagement, which means that there was no significant mediation between cognitive performance, school engagement and school performance. This study provides further scientific evidence that cognitive performance and school engagement both affect school performance. Even though cognitive skills and school engagement were not significantly related in this study, it would be important to conduct more research on this topic in the future.