Achievement in national scholastic examinations and its link with measured cognitive ability among a representative Irish sample

The paper examines the relationship between cognitive ability at approximately seventeen years of age and academic achievement in a nationwide set of examinations taken prior to this time. The sample comprised 6,216 children who participated in wave 3 of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) longitudinal study. Other variables assessed included gender, personality measures, household income, parental educational achievement, and school attributes. Up to ten variables made a statistically significant contribution in explaining achievement, but cognitive ability was by far the most important, followed by gender. Entering a cognitive ability measure taken in wave 2 of the longitudinal survey (four years previously) instead of wave 3 produced an almost identical outcome in a multiple regression.

While boys outperformed girls on the cognitive measure, girls outperformed boys, with a small effect size, in educational achievement; this might be explained by girls’ higher scores on the dimension, ‘conscientiousness’. Household income was only modestly associated with educational achievement.