Although phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are confirmed as early predictors of reading in a large number of orthographies, it is as yet unclear whether the predictive patterns are universal or language specific. This was examined in a longitudinal study across Grades 1 and 2 with 1,120 children acquiring one of five alphabetic orthographies with different degrees of orthographic complexity (English, French, German, Dutch, and Greek). Path analyses revealed that a universal model could not be confirmed. When we specified the best-fitting model separately for each language, RAN was a consistent predictor of reading fluency in all orthographies, whereas the association between PA and reading was complex and mostly interactive. We conclude that RAN taps into a language-universal cognitive mechanism that is involved in reading alphabetic orthographies (independent of complexity), whereas the PA-reading relationship depends on many factors like task characteristics, developmental status, and orthographic complexity. Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have consistently been found to be closely associated with children's reading development explaining unique variance in children's reading skills above and beyond general factors like age and nonverbal IQ (Araújo, Reis, Petersson, & Faísca, 2015; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012; Norton & Wolf, 2012). PA refers to the ability to identify and manipulate phonological segments in spoken words, and RAN denotes the ability to name serial displays of letters, digits, pictured objects, or colors as quickly as possible. PA is important as all orthographic systems represent phonological units in one way or another. Children with deficient access to the relevant phonological units will have problems to fully understand the mappings between a certain spoken language and its orthography and training of PA seems to improve reading outcomes (e.g., Suggate, 2016). An important and as yet unresolved issue is whether PA precedes reading acquisition or whether it evolves as a consequence or during the course of learning to read (

The results provide insight into the relationship between students' attitudes, dispositions, experiences of anxiety in the examination, and academic achievement, and give recommendations to instructors on how to support students prior to and in the examination.

This study investigates the extent to which girls' better school attainment is associated with sex differences in intelligence, personality and school‐related motivation. In a sample of 1353 Austrian pupils (mean age 13.74 years), intelligence, the Big Five of personality, self‐esteem, school anxiety, school‐related intrinsic motivation and achievement goals were assessed as predictors and GPA as achievement criterion. Most predictors yielded significant mean differences between sexes and some of the variables predicted school achievement only for boys or only for girls. Intelligence and self‐esteem were the strongest predictors of GPA for both sexes, and school‐related intrinsic motivation, school anxiety and performance‐avoidance goals explained additional variance in GPA only for boys, whereas work avoidance did so only for girls. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

No abstract

The neural efficiency hypothesis describes the phenomenon that brighter individuals show lower brain activation than less bright individuals when working on the same cognitive tasks. The present study investigated whether the brain activation–intelligence relationship still applies when more versus less intelligent individuals perform tasks with a comparable person-specific task difficulty. In an fMRI-study, 58 persons with lower (n = 28) or respectively higher (n = 30) intelligence worked on simple and difficult inductive reasoning tasks having the same person-specific task difficulty. Consequently, less bright individuals received sample-based easy and medium tasks, whereas bright subjects received sample-based medium and difficult tasks. This design also allowed a comparison of lower versus higher intelligent individuals when working on the same tasks (i.e. sample-based medium task difficulty). In line with expectations, differences in task performance and in brain activation were only found for the subset of tasks with the same sample-based task difficulty, but not when comparing tasks with the same person-specific task difficulty. These results suggest that neural efficiency reflects an (ability-dependent) adaption of brain activation to the respective task demands.