Study Habits, Skills, and Attitudes: The Third Pillar Supporting Collegiate Academic Performance
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 1 November 2008
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Perspectives on Psychological Science
- Vol. 3 (6), 425-453
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00089.x
Abstract
Study habit, skill, and attitude inventories and constructs were found to rival standardized tests and previous grades as predictors of academic performance, yielding substantial incremental validity in predicting academic performance. This meta-analysis (N = 72,431, k = 344) examines the construct validity and predictive validity of 10 study skill constructs for college students. We found that study skill inventories and constructs are largely independent of both high school grades and scores on standardized admissions tests but moderately related to various personality constructs; these results are inconsistent with previous theories. Study motivation and study skills exhibit the strongest relationships with both grade point average and grades in individual classes. Academic specific anxiety was found to be an important negative predictor of performance. In addition, significant variation in the validity of specific inventories is shown. Scores on traditional study habit and attitude inventories are the most predictive of performance, whereas scores on inventories based on the popular depth-of-processing perspective are shown to be least predictive of the examined criteria. Overall, study habit and skill measures improve prediction of academic performance more than any other noncognitive individual difference variable examined to date and should be regarded as the third pillar of academic success.Keywords
This publication has 100 references indexed in Scilit:
- Intuition-Analysis Style and Approaches to StudyingEducational Studies, 1999
- Differences Among Low‐, Average‐ and High‐achieving College Students on Learning and Study StrategiesEducational Psychology, 1997
- ‘Learning Style’: frameworks and instrumentsEducational Psychology, 1997
- Prediction of Academic Performance among Chinese Students: Effort Can Compensate for Lack of AbilityOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1996
- Approaches to Studying in Higher Education: a comparative study in the South PacificEducational Psychology, 1995
- An instrument for the assessment of study behaviors of college studentsReading Research and Instruction, 1993
- First Year University Physics: who succeeds?Research in Science & Technological Education, 1993
- Academic Effort and College GradesSocial Forces, 1989
- Correlative Data for First-Semester Grade Averages at the University of California, Santa BarbaraThe Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1961
- An evaluation of the Tyler-Kimber Study Skills Test.Journal of Applied Psychology, 1942