CONNECTEDNESS: A STUDY OF THE COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF SUCCESSFUL AND UNSUCCESSFUL HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS
Abstract (summary)
The purpose of this study was to identify the interactions among selected measures of cognition, affect, and academic achievement to determine why students--even good students--fail in high school and college settings. Traditional approaches have focused on measures of cognition, but have not been particularly informing for either prediction or intervention purposes. Such measures do identify the extremes, the high and low achievers, but do little to assess the potential of the large middle group. This study was based on an assumption that both potential and achievement result from a combination of abstract thinking skills and a network of self-perceptions that reinforce the value of the experience and one's ability to succeed.
The pertinent cognitive skills were proposed to be reading comprehension, memory for academic text, essay writing, notemaking, and the recognition of propositional relationships in text; the proposed affective factors were self-perceptions of value for the experience, know-how or ability, task orientation, power and control of the success factors, and anxiety and alienation. There were 111 subjects in this study: 69 high school juniors and 42 college juniors.
Two research questions framed the study. The first concerned the part cognition and affect play in academic achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that a combination of cognitive and affective factors were the best predictors for both samples, and analyses of variance revealed significant GPA group differences on the cognitive and affective measures.
The second research question concerned the performance, skill, and attitude differences of those high on both cognition and affect, low on both, or mixed. This question was focused on a proposed model called connectedness where high/low scales of cognition and affect were used to group students into one of four categories: high cognition/high affect (HH), high cognition/low affect (HL), low cognition/high affect (LH), and low cognition/low affect (LL). HH and LL were, as expected, at the extremes on the cognitive and affective variables but the middle groups, the HL and LH, which were indistinguishable in terms of GPA had very distinct patterns: it was the LH who were the most committed to their education and the HL who appeared to be the most at risk.