Role of resilient personality on lower achieving first grade students' current and future achievement
Section snippets
Ego-resiliency
Ego-control and ego-resiliency are conceptually independent but dynamically linked control systems (Kremen & Block, 1998). “Whereas ego-control refers to the degree to which individuals express their impulses, ego-resiliency describes the internal personality structures that function to modulate these impulses adaptively” (Huey & Weisz, 1997, p. 404). The ego-control dimension ranges from ego-undercontrol (a relatively low threshold for the expression of urges) to ego-overcontrol (a relatively
Participants
Participants were first-grade children attending one of three school districts (one urban, two small city) in southeast and central Texas drawn from a larger sample (N = 784) of children participating in a longitudinal study examining the impact of grade retention on academic achievement. The student enrollment for the three schools was 42% White, 25% African American, and 27% Hispanic. Participants were recruited across two sequential cohorts in first-grade during the fall of 2001 and 2002.
Results
The results are presented in two sections. First, confirmatory factor analysis of the cross-sectional data is used to test a second-order measurement model of resilient personality. Second, this measurement model is used in cross-sectional and longitudinal structural model testing to determine whether resilient personality is associated with academic achievement after controlling for general cognitive ability, externalizing problems, and family economic adversity. Gender difference on the
Discussion
The latent construct of resilient personality uniquely predicted first grade children's concurrent and future reading and math achievement above the effects of general cognitive ability, externalizing problems, and family economic adversity. The finding that personality resiliency measured in first grade predicts reading and math scores one year later, although predicted, is remarkable given the stability of both reading (.75) and math (.81) achievement. Although other researchers have found
Acknowledgement
This research was supported in part by grant to Jan Hughes from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (5 R01 HD39367-02).
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2014, Journal of Applied Developmental PsychologyCitation Excerpt :The second phase of analyses used hierarchical multiple regression analysis to examine the separate and joint contributions of the LRS constructs (i.e., EC, BSR, and SC) to children's reading and math achievement with the child's gender, economic adversity status, and IQ included as covariates. These covariates were employed based on their association with LRS (Matthews et al., 2010; Neuenschwander et al., 2012) and academic achievement (Kwok, Hughes, & Luo, 2007; Liew et al., 2010). In the third phase of analyses, using the MODEL INDIRECT routine in Mplus (version 7.0, Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2012), we tested the indirect effects of EC via BSR and EC via SC on reading and math achievement.
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The authors contributed equally to this manuscript.