Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Articles
  • Op-eds
  • Videos
  • Learning Styles FAQ
  • Daniel Willingham: Science and Education Blog

What predicts college GPA?

2/18/2013

 
What aspects of background, personality, or achievement predict success in college--at least, "success" as measured by GPA?

A recent meta-analysis (Richardson, Abraham, & Bond, 2012) gathered articles published between 1997 and 2010, the products of 241 data sets. These articles had investigated these categories of predictors:
  • three demographic factors (age, sex, socio-economic status)
  • five traditional measures of cognitive ability or prior academic achievement (intelligence measures, high school GPA, SAT or ACT, A level points)
  • No fewer than forty-two non-intellectual measures of personality, motivation, or the like, summarized into the categories shown in the figure below (click for larger image).
Picture
Make this fun. Try to predict which of the factors correlate with college GPA.

Let's start with simple correlations.

41 out of the 50 variables examined showed statistically significant correlations. But statistical significance is a product of the magnitude of the effect AND the size of the sample--and the samples are so big that relatively puny effects end up being statistically significant. So in what follows I'll mention correlations of .20 or greater.

Among the demographic factors, none of the three were strong predictors. It seems odd that socio-economic status would not be important, but bear in mind that we are talking about college students, so this is a pretty select group, and SES likely played a significant role in that selection. Most low-income kids didn't make it, and those who did likely have a lot of other strengths.

The best class of predictors (by far) are the traditional correlates, all of which correlate at least r = .20 (intelligence measures) up to r = .40 (high school GPA; ACT scores were also correlated r = .40).

Personality traits were mostly a bust, with the exception of consientiousness (r = .19), need for cognition (r = .19), and tendency to procrastinate (r = -.22). (Procrastination has a pretty tight inverse relationship to conscientiousness, so it strikes me as a little odd to include it.)

Motivation measures were also mostly a bust but there were strong correlations with academic self-efficacy (r = .31) and performance self-efficacy (r = .59). You should note, however, that the former is pretty much like asking students "are you good at school?" and the latter is like asking "what kind of grades do you usually get?" Somewhat more interesting is "grade goal" (r = .35) which measures whether the student is in the habit of setting a specific goal for test scores and course grades, based on prior feedback.

Self-regulatory learning strategies likewise showed only a few factors that provided reliable predictors, including time/study management (r = .22) and effort regulation (r = .32), a measure of persistence in the face of academic challenges.

Not much happened in the Approach to learning category nor in psychosocial contextual influences.

We would, of course, expect that many of these variables would themselves be correlated, and that's the case, as shown in this matrix.
Picture
So the really interesting analyses are regressions that try to sort out which matter more.

The researchers first conducted five hierarchical linear regressions, in each case beginning with SAT/ACT, then adding high school GPA, and then investigating whether each of the five non-intellective predictors would add some predictive power. The variables were conscientiousness, effort regulation, test anxiety, academic self efficacy, and grade goal, and each did, indeed, add power in predicting college GPA after "the usual suspects" (SAT or ACT, and high school GPA) were included.

But what happens when you include all the non-intellective factors in the model?

The order in which they are entered matters, of course, and the researchers offer a reasonable rationale for their choice; they start with the most global characteristic (conscientiousness) and work towards the more proximal contributors to grades (effort regulation, then test anxiety, then academic self-efficacy, then grade goal).

As they ran the model, SAT and high school GPA continued to be important predictors. So were effort regulation and grade goal.

You can usually quibble about the order in which variables were entered and the rationale for that ordering, and that's the case here.  As they put the data together, the most important predictors of college grade point average are: your grades in high school, your score on the SAT or ACT, the extent to which you plan for and target specific grades, and your ability to persist in challenging academic situations.

There is not much support here for the idea that demographic or psychosocial contextual variables matter much. Broad personality traits, most motivation factors, and learning strategies matter less than I would have guessed.

No single analysis of this sort will be definitive. But aside from that caveat, it's important to note that most admissions officers would not want to use this study as a one-to-one guide for admissions decisions. Colleges are motivated to admit students who can do the work, certainly. But beyond that they have goals for the student body on other dimensions: diversity of skill in non-academic pursuits, or creativity, for example.

When I was a graduate student at Harvard, an admissions officer mentioned in passing that, if Harvard wanted to, the college could fill the freshman class with students who had perfect scores on the SAT. Every single freshman-- 800, 800. But that, he said, was not the sort of freshman class Harvard wanted.

I nodded as though I knew exactly what he meant. I wish I had pressed him for more information.

References:
Richardson, M., Abraham, C., Bond, R. (2012). Psychological correlates of university students' academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 138,  353-387.


Steve Straight
2/18/2013 02:31:58 am

Dan, it would be interesting to me, as a community college teacher, to see if there were any clear differences between two-year and four-year college students.

Cedar Riener link
2/18/2013 02:41:12 am

Hey Dan,
As an undergrad at Harvard at around the same time you were a grad student, I would also add that they could fill their class 6 times with valedictorians. In other words, you could have an entire freshman class who had never gotten a B.
As a professor now I could see some problems with that. There was already pretty amazing competitive pressures at Harvard, I bet that would be one way of turning up the dial on those.
If you only took highest grades and SAT's, you would sacrifice a whole lot of psychological diversity, if not socioeconomic and ethnic. You would have a lot more people walking around being very very disappointed in their first B (or even, shudder,a C- !). I would also guess that there might be some sacrifice in diversity of interests, such as theater and art. But I could be wrong about that.

Dan Willingham
2/18/2013 03:36:58 am

I wish I had asked directly. . .but he probably wouldn't have given me a very straight answer. In other conversations he left me with the impression that they really esteemed students who had shown evidence of taking on big projects and following through.

Kirsten Larson
2/18/2013 03:14:59 am

This is an interesting analysis, but I wonder how it would translate for adult learners, for example the students I teach at the University of Phoenix. I would guess none of them took an SAT. And I would guess their GPAs in high school varied wildly. Would the non-intellicative predictors suffice for them? Or do they only work when combined with SAT and GPA?

Shari Usa
2/18/2013 03:33:03 am

I would guess that adults who are working and taking online courses would score well in the goal-setting and perseverance categories ("the extent to which you plan for and target specific grades, and your ability to persist in challenging academic situations").

Dan Willingham
2/18/2013 03:35:02 am

It's also possible that perseverance measures wouldn't correlate with success at U of Phoenix because there's not much variability--everyone is pretty motivated.

Shari Usa
2/18/2013 03:41:59 am

Since ACT/SAT are standardized tests, this makes sense to me. I'm curious about high school GPA. Does GPA matter more than course rigor? In other words, is GPA still a an accurate predictor if a student gets a 4.0 in basket-weaving type classes compared to a 3.0 in AP, dual credit, foreign language, and other rigorous courses. What about quality of instruction? Is the emotional success of an "A" grade with an easy teacher a better indicator of college GPA than a "B" grade with a rigorous teacher?

Darin Schmidt link
2/18/2013 08:48:04 am

You might want to check out a book called Crossing the Finish Line. It takes a different spin on this whole discussion by examining correlations with college completion rather than college GPA - arguably a better question to investigate. The upshot is that the dangers of inflated GPA are vastly overstated. As far as rigor goes, I suspect that HS rigor is more correlated with the type of higher education institution than GPA. That question might also be addressed in the book.

Shari Usa
2/18/2013 11:30:10 pm

"The upshot is that the dangers of inflated GPA are vastly overstated."
So, am I to understand that GPA is more important than rigor? A sort of, "I can succeed because I've done it before. I know what success feels like."
Just wondering if the study took this into account. I've seen so many athletes drop out of college within the first few weeks. However, I don't know if this is attributed to academic struggles or not.
Thanks for your input and the recommendation, Darin.

Sanjay Srivastava link
2/18/2013 09:33:25 am

"Broad personality traits, most motivation factors, and learning strategies matter less than I would have guessed."

In the zero-order correlations, conscientiousness mattered about as much as intelligence, which is about what I would have guessed and which is similar to the I/O literature on workplace outcomes. r=.20 isn't bad, especially when you consider that these are students who got into college -- so the sample is already pretty range-restricted on those 2 variables.

It's also important not to view a broad trait factor like conscientiousness and a more focused construct like effort regulation as competing predictors. Empirically, they're pretty highly correlated according to the table you posted. Conceptually, most models of personality traits propose a hierarchical structure, where a broad domain like conscientiousness is composed of a variety of more specific facets. Some of those won't matter for grades as much as others. E.g. the order facet of conscientiousness (sample item from the IPIP: "Like to tidy up") is probably not as predictive as the self-efficacy facet ("Complete tasks successfully").

A better way to think of it is that a narrower construct like effort regulation is one of many possible facets or manifestations of conscientiousness. So I'd view the hierarchical regressions as clarifying what parts of conscientiousness matter, rather than testing between competing predictors.

Dan Willingham
2/18/2013 10:49:03 am

Nicely put, Sanjay, and I think the authors would agree with you, given the strategy they selected re: order of entry in the regression.

Corey link
2/19/2013 03:47:39 am

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there an endogeneity problem here? Many of these cognitive and non-cognitive factors influence high school GPA (and SAT score), so I'm not sure why we'd control for HS GPA when trying to determine the influence of any of these factors on college GPA.

Catherine Crystal Foster link
2/22/2013 04:48:12 am

Do the meta-analysis and underlying study factor out students who failed to persist in college? In other words, did this look at the GPAs and correlative factors for low-income and/or first-generation college students, who are less likely to complete college?


Comments are closed.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    RSS Feed


    Purpose

    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

    Archives

    July 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    December 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012

    Categories

    All
    21st Century Skills
    Academic Achievement
    Academic Achievement
    Achievement Gap
    Adhd
    Aera
    Animal Subjects
    Attention
    Book Review
    Charter Schools
    Child Development
    Classroom Time
    College
    Consciousness
    Curriculum
    Data Trustworthiness
    Education Schools
    Emotion
    Equality
    Exercise
    Expertise
    Forfun
    Gaming
    Gender
    Grades
    Higher Ed
    Homework
    Instructional Materials
    Intelligence
    International Comparisons
    Interventions
    Low Achievement
    Math
    Memory
    Meta Analysis
    Meta-analysis
    Metacognition
    Morality
    Motor Skill
    Multitasking
    Music
    Neuroscience
    Obituaries
    Parents
    Perception
    Phonological Awareness
    Plagiarism
    Politics
    Poverty
    Preschool
    Principals
    Prior Knowledge
    Problem-solving
    Reading
    Research
    Science
    Self-concept
    Self Control
    Self-control
    Sleep
    Socioeconomic Status
    Spatial Skills
    Standardized Tests
    Stereotypes
    Stress
    Teacher Evaluation
    Teaching
    Technology
    Value-added
    Vocabulary
    Working Memory