Teacher-perceived temperament and educational competence as predictors of school grades

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Abstract

Associations between teacher-perceived temperament, educational competence (EC), and school grades in mother language (ML) and mathematics (Math) were assessed in 3212 students (1619 girls) in Secondary School (aged 13–19) taken from a nationally representative Finnish sample. Temperament was assessed with scales from the TABC-R and DOTS-R batteries. EC consists of cognitive ability, motivation, and maturity. Activity, persistence, distractibility, inhibition, and negative emotionality were significantly associated with both ML and Math grades. EC turned out to mediate the relationship between temperament and school performance and moderated the relationship of activity to Math. The findings show a high association between teacher-rated temperament and school performance and indicate a strong “halo effect” between temperament, EC, and school grades.

Introduction

School grades play a far-reaching role in the transition from one school stage to another. However, the grades are mostly based on teachers' ratings rather than standardised tests and likely to be influenced by the subjective perceptions of the teachers that reflect teachers' personal expectations, opinions, values, and attitudes (Jussim & Harber, 2005). Notwithstanding, there has been relatively little systematic research on factors that influence teachers' perceptions of students characteristics, other than cognitive ones.

There is increasing evidence that a student's temperament plays a significant role in teachers' conceptions, affecting their student–teacher relationship (DiLalla, Marcus, & Wright-Phillips, 2004), their attitudes toward the student (for a review, see Martin, 1989, Guerin et al., 2003), their expectations concerning his or her abilities (Keogh, 1994), and even their teaching decisions (i.e., the way they teach certain students) (for reviews, see Martin, 1989, Keogh, 1989, Rothbart and Jones, 1998). Temperament refers to a behavioural style or behavioural tendencies that are present in early life, and are relatively stable across various situations and over the course of time (see Goldsmith, Lemeny, Aksan, & Buss, 2000). They are biologically rooted, i.e., partly inherited and strongly associated with brain metabolism (Buss and Plomin, 1984, Buss and Plomin, 1975). Temperament contributes to the uniqueness of individuals and forms a core that provides a foundation for later personality, which in turn include except cognitions about self and others, also social factors like values, attitudes, and coping strategies (for reviews, see Posner and Rothbart, 2007, Rothbart, 2007, Rothbart and Bates, 2006, Strelau, 1998). Temperament refers to the raw material out of which personality is fashioned, and temperament and experience together “grow” a personality (Rothbart, 2007). It is relatively independent of cognitions: only low to moderate correlations between measures of IQ and temperament have been found (for reviews, see Strelau, 1998, Guerin et al., 2003) or IQ has been shown to moderate a relation between temperament and school achievement (Oliver, Guerin, & Gottfried, 2007).

Keogh, 1989, Keogh, 2003 introduced the concept of “teachability,” which reflects the teacher's view of the attributes of a model student, and is affected by three primary factors consisting of temperamental dimensions. The first of these is labelled “task orientation” and is composed of activity, persistence and distractibility (Keogh, Pullis & Cadwell, 1982), temperament traits found to be related to learning style (i.e., to attention and how students approach a learning task) (Martin, 1989, Caspi, 1998). Activity refers to the frequency and intensity of motor activity, and persistence to attention span and the tendency to continue seeking a solution to difficult learning or performance problems. Distractibility means the ease with which a student's attention, especially ongoing task-related school behaviour, can be interrupted by low-level environmental stimuli (Martin, 1989, Windle and Lerner, 1986). Students with the temperamental pattern of high activity, low persistence, and high distractibility are consistently perceived by their teachers as low in educational competence, that means that compared with standardised tests, the teachers underestimated their intelligence, motivation and cognitive maturity (for reviews, see Keogh, 1994, Keogh, 2003).

The second factor, “personal–social flexibility,” refers to approach, positive mood and adaptability. Students with a positive mood and high adaptability receive higher grades than might be expected on the basis of standardised achievement tests. The third factor is labelled “reactivity” and consists of negative mood, intensity of response, and high reactivity. It contributes to teachers' opinions of students (i.e. how much the teacher likes a student) (Keogh, 1994). Teachers are seen highly reactive students as irritable and “prickly” and as difficult to teach (Keogh et al., 1982, Thomas and Chess, 1977). Consequently, children with poor student–teacher relationships, marked by conflict and dependency, have received lower grades in school (e.g., DiLalla et al., 2004, Hamre and Pianta, 2001).

It has been suggested that temperament plays different roles in different school subjects. Indeed, it has been shown that temperament, especially task orientation, correlates slightly higher with mother language (ML) than with mathematics (Math) (for reviews, see Martin, 1989, Strelau, 1998, Guerin et al., 1994), although there are also opposite findings (Maziade, Cote, Boutin, Boudreault, & Thivierge, 1986). Previous studies have mostly been carried out in kindergartens, at preschool or primary school, and the samples have been relatively small. To the best of our knowledge there has been no population-based study on the role of teacher-perceived temperament and educational competence in school grades.

The aim of the present study was to examine the associations of teacher- perceived temperament and educational competence (EC, i.e., cognitive ability, motivation and maturity) on ML and Math grades in a population-based sample of Finnish adolescents in their last year of comprehensive school. Given the inconsistent evidence reported in previous studies considering whether temperament correlates differently with different subjects (Guerin et al., 1994; for a review, see Strelau, 1998), we focused on ML and Math. We hypothesised that (a) temperament would be directly related with both teacher-perceived educational competence and school grades, (b) EC contributes as a mediator and/or as a moderator to the association between temperament dimensions and the school grades, and (c) because ML and Math require different skills, students would be perceived differently by their respective teachers. We also considered the interactive effect of gender because of the inconsistent research evidence on this issue (e.g., Guerin et al., 2003).

The Finnish educational system consists of nine years of compulsory schooling (six years at primary school and three years at lower-secondary school). For the following reasons, the Finnish comprehensive school is the most appropriate “real-life laboratory”. The whole age group can be contacted because there are no private schools or parallel school systems. Teachers are similarly educated and all schools follow the same national curriculum. Approximately 97% of students in each age group goes through this public comprehensive school in regular classes (of which approximately seven percent are under special, individual supervision, approximately two percent are in special, “tailored” classes, and less than one percent leave without completing this education). After comprehensive school almost all students move on either to Upper-Secondary Schools (approximately 64%) or Vocational Institutions (approximately 30%), and less than five percent drop out of this secondary education.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants were 3212 adolescents (1619 girls) aged 13–19 (M = 15.1 years, SD = 0.37) participating in the “The Finnish Study of Temperament and School Achievement” project (FTSA; Alatupa, Karppinen, Keltikangas-Järvinen, & Savioja, 2007). A geographically representative sample of lower-secondary schools was compiled as follows: Finland was geographically divided into five provinces with a total of 636 schools, and from each province 10% of the Finnish-speaking schools were randomly selected.

Results

The mean values and standard deviations for the parameters are given in Table 1. Although there were significant (ps < .001) gender differences between all the study variables, there were, however, no gender × temperament, gender × EC, or gender × temperament × EC interactions in predicting school grades. Table 2 presents the bivariate correlations of the variables. The correlations between the temperament dimensions were mostly significant (ps < .001). All the temperament factors correlated significantly

Discussion

We found, first, that the temperament factors of activity, persistence, distractibility, inhibition and negative emotionality were significantly associated with both ML and Math grades, explaining together 28% and 29% of the variance, respectively. This association remained after adjustment for gender. Of the single traits, inhibition was the most important predictor of the ML grade, and activity for Math, explaining 11% of their variances: high inhibition predicted a low ML grade, while high

Conclusions

To conclude, our findings suggest that teachers need more information about the influence of temperament in order to differentiate cognitive skills from behavioural styles, and consequently to ensure equitable treatment for all students. This is important because temperament differs from intelligence, cognitive ability, maturity and motivation (for a review, see Strelau, 1998), and because the school reports have significant and far-reaching roles in students' academic lives.

The present results

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