This study investigated the effects of social-emotional competency on pupils’ academic achievement, academic emotions and attitudes, and interpersonal relationships. Participants were 7106 fourth-grade and fifth-grade students in western China. The results were: (1) social-emotional competency positively predicted pupils’ academic achievement (including reading, mathematics, and science); (2) social-emotional competency predicted pupils’ academic emotions and attitudes, including learning anxiety and interest, and academic emotions and attitudes played a mediating role in the relation between social-emotional competency and academic achievement; and (3) social-emotional competency positively predicted pupils’ interpersonal relationships, including peer relationships and teacher–student relationships, and interpersonal relationships played a mediating role in the relation between social-emotional competency and academic achievement. These findings highlighted the importance of social-emotional competency to child development in western China, where many children might lack their parents’ company.

No abstract

Response styles, the general tendency to use certain categories of rating scales over others, are a threat to the reliability and validity of self-report measures. The mixed partial credit model, the multidimensional nominal response model, and the item response tree model are three widely used models for measuring extreme and midpoint response styles and correcting their effects. This research aimed to examine and compare their validity by fitting them to empirical data and correlating the content-related factors and the response style-related factors in these models to extraneous criteria. The results showed that the content factors yielded by these models were moderately related to the content criterion and not related to the response style criteria. The response style factors were moderately related to the response style criteria and weakly related to the content criterion. Simultaneous analysis of more than one scale could improve their validity for measuring response styles. These findings indicate that the three models could control and measure extreme and midpoint response styles, though the validity of the mPCM for measuring response styles was not good in some cases. Overall, the multidimensional nominal response model performed slightly better than the other two models.

Muchos estudios anteriores han discutido la influencia de factores extrínsecos (por ejemplo, hábitat) en el éxito académico de los niños de China occidental. El presente estudio se centró en cuatro factores no cognitivos, aspiración autopedagógicas, autoeficacia, motivación instrumentaly ansiedad, que puede afectar el logro de las matemáticas. El propósito de este estudio era investigar los mecanismos de cómo estos cuatro factores no cognitivos afectaron logro matemáticas. 5774 primaria los estudiantes del grado 4 º y 5 º en el oeste de China participaron en este estudio. Se construyó un modelo de mediación encadenado moderado. Los resultados mostraron que autopedagógicas aspiración positiva podía predecir logro matemáticas. Sin embargo, la ansiedad y motivación instrumental forman encadenado mediación entre autopedagógicas logro de aspiración y de las matemáticas y el logro de matemáticas negativamente prevista. Además, la autoeficacia desempeñó un papel moderado en la relación entre la aspiración de la autopedagógicas y la ansiedad. Many previous studies have discussed the influence of extrinsic factors (e.g. living environment) on academic achievement of children from western China. The present study focused on four non-cognitive factors, self-educational aspiration, self-efficacy, instrumental motivation, and anxiety, which could affect mathematics achievement. The purpose of this study was to investigate the mechanisms how these four non-cognitive factors affected mathematics achievement. 5774 primary school students from 4th and 5th grade in western China participated in this study. A moderated chained mediation model was constructed. The results showed that self-educational aspiration could positively predict mathematics achievement. However, instrumental motivation and anxiety formed chained mediation between self-educational aspiration and mathematics achievement, and negatively predicted mathematics achievement. Besides, self-efficacy played a moderated role in the relationship between self-educational aspiration and anxiety.