Predicting College Success: The Relative Contributions of Five Social/Personality Factors, Five Cognitive/Learning Factors, and SAT Scores

Abstract

To-date, studies have examined simultaneously the relative predictive powers of two or three factors on GPA performance. The present study examines the relative powers of five social/personality factors, five cognitive/learning factors, and SAT scores to predict freshmen and non-freshmen (sophomores, juniors, seniors) academic success (i.e., GPA). The results revealed many significant predictors of GPA for both freshmen and non-freshmen. However, subsequent regressions showed that only academic self-efficacy, epistemic belief of learning, and high-knowledge integration explained unique variance in overall GPA (19%-freshmen, 23.2%-non-freshmen), a finding that suggests that test anxiety, locus of control and achievement motivation goals fail to account for unique variance in GPA and that social/personality measures are more predictive of GPA then are learning/cognitive measures. Further for freshmen, SAT scores explained an additional unique 10.6% variance after the influences attributed to these three predictors was removed whereas for non-freshmen, SAT scores failed to explain any additional variance. These results highlight the unique and important contributions of academic self-efficacy, epistemic belief of learning and high-knowledge integration to overall GPA beyond other previously-identified predictors, such as test anxiety, locus of control, achievement motivation and SAT scores.