Predicting school achievement from early theory of mind: Differential effects on achievement tests and teacher ratings

Lockl, Kathrin; Ebert, Susanne; Weinert, Sabine

doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2016.11.007

Cited by 34 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Using data from a large-scale assessment of German students in early secondary schools, we provided evidence that social behavior has a disproportionate evidence on grades in comparison to achievement tests. Specifically these findings help reconcile differential findings from studies using only grades or achievement tests as an outcome measure (e.g., (Adams et al, 1999 ; Malecki and Elliot, 2002 ; Lockl et al, 2017 ; Gerbino et al, 2018 ). In our model, significant relationships between social behavior and both grades and early test scores, but not later test scores, remained.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…For instance, many educators include behavior measures in their grading (Cross and Frary, 1999 ), and grades have been shown to reflect numerous personality factors in addition to academic competence (Borghans et al, 2011 ; Andrei et al, 2015 ; Lechner et al, 2017 ; Gerbino et al, 2018 ). For example, Lockl et al ( 2017 ) found that theory of mind in kindergarten predicted grades in grade 1 and 2, but they did not examine any connection to achievement test scores. Moreover, theory of mind represents a specific aspect of social development, and more research examining peer problems and prosocial behavior is needed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Does Social Behavior Relate to Both Grades and Achievement Scores?

2018

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Prosocial behavior and peer problems are an important correlate of academic development; however, these effects vary by achievement measures and social behaviors. In this paper, we examined data from the German National Education Panel Study (NEPS), and we use structural equation modeling (SEM) to model the effects of prosocial behavior and peer problems on grades and competencies for both math (n = 3,310) and reading (n = 3,308) in grades 5 and 7. Our models account for the moderating effect of both gender and socioeconomic status (SES) as determined by parental education. We conclude that social behaviors relate to grades more strongly than competencies, that peer problems relate more strongly to achievement than prosocial behavior, and that the relationship is weaker in later grades. We discuss the implication that grades and achievement tests are not interchangeable measures for educators and researchers.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Does Social Behavior Relate to Both Grades and Achievement Scores?

2018

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“…However, the present results also showed that those who scored higher on ToM and empathy may also experience greater feelings of guilt and shame (Leece et al, 2017;Lockl et al, 2017). Such findings support studies that suggest being skilled in understanding the perspectives and emotions of others may in part hinder one's private emotion knowledge in that it may reduce one's awareness and attention to the emotional self (Leary & Guadagno, 2011).…”

Section: Relations Among Tom Emotion Knowledge and School Engagementsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Social-emotional skills such as perspective taking and empathy are especially important for the development of school engagement, memory and academic achievement, and prosocial relations (Ahmed et al, 2018;Estevez et al, 2018;Ross & Tolan, 2017;Zorza et al, 2018). Although past studies have found positive associations among younger children's ToM, memory, and school success (Lecece et al, 2017;Lockl et al, 2017), and social relations (Feldman et al, 2014;Fink et al, 2015;Lecce et al, 2017), few studies explore relations among ToM, empathy, and school engagement in emerging adolescents. That is, to the best of our knowledge, there remains a lack of studies on the connections among ToM and related social-emotional skills, emotion knowledge, and school success in young adolescents (Campbell et al, 2018;Moore-McBride et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind, Emotion Knowledge, and School Engagement in Emerging Adolescents

Bosacki¹,

Moreira²,

Sitnik³

et al. 2019

iejee

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Theory of Mind (ToM), or the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others to predict behavior is an important skill that helps adolescents to navigate through school. Building on emerging research on the cognitive and affective aspects of ToM and school engagement, this cross-sectional study explored ToM, emotion knowledge, and school engagement in 32 adolescents (22 females; Mage = 187.2 mos-15.16 years, SD= 3.29) from central Canada. Positive correlations were found between ToM and school engagement, controlling for language. Higher levels of experiences of guilt and shame were associated with higher levels of ToM and school engagment. Verbal ability significantly contributed to total perceptions of school engagement. Implications for adolescents' social cognition, mental health, and school experiences are discussed.

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“…However, previous studies investigating the link between ToM and reading comprehension have shown mixed results. Whereas some have reported significant direct effects of ToM on reading comprehension, even after accounting for language skills and listening comprehension (Atkinson et al, 2017;Boerma et al, 2017), others have not found direct links after considering language skills or listening comprehension (Guajardo and Cartwright, 2016;Kim, 2017;Ebert, 2020) or they have found no correlations at all (Lockl et al, 2017). However, there is evidence that suggests that, particularly beyond the preschool years, when more advanced measures of reading and more advanced measures of ToM such as higher-order mental reasoning or the reference to mental states in more complex situations are assessed, ToM is related to reading comprehension (Boerma et al, 2017;Florit et al, 2020).…”

Section: Theory Of Mind (Tom)mentioning

confidence: 96%

Early Language Competencies and Advanced Measures of Mental State Understanding Are Differently Related to Listening and Reading Comprehension in Early Adolescence

Ebert

2020

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

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The present study tests a section of the DIET (direct and indirect effects model of text comprehension; Kim, 2017) model and focuses on the relations between early language skills, various facets of mental state understanding, and text comprehension. In a sample of 267 children, I analyzed the relations between language skills (vocabulary, sentence comprehension) at age 3;6, theory of mind (ToM) at age 5;6, mental state language and metacognitive knowledge at age 9;2, and children's listening and reading comprehension of texts at age 13;7 years. For reading comprehension, results favored a total mediation model that included only direct links from metacognitive knowledge and mental state language to reading comprehension. For listening comprehension, by contrast, a model that also included direct relations from language and ToM in preschool was favored. Metacognitive skills did not mediate the relation between early skills and later text comprehension but, along with mental state language, showed direct relations with reading comprehension beyond listening comprehension. Early language skills showed various indirect relations with later reading comprehension via ToM, mental state language, and listening comprehension, whereas ToM showed only small indirect relations with later reading comprehension via later listening comprehension. These different relations of the various components with later listening in contrast to reading comprehension are discussed.

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Predicting school achievement from early theory of mind: Differential effects on achievement tests and teacher ratings

Cited by 34 publications

References 65 publications

How Does Social Behavior Relate to Both Grades and Achievement Scores?

How Does Social Behavior Relate to Both Grades and Achievement Scores?

Theory of Mind, Emotion Knowledge, and School Engagement in Emerging Adolescents

Early Language Competencies and Advanced Measures of Mental State Understanding Are Differently Related to Listening and Reading Comprehension in Early Adolescence

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