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Implicit and explicit beliefs and evaluations about math and self predict math and verbal achievement

Understanding how students’ beliefs and evaluations contribute to elementary-school academic achievement is important for improving student learning. There is an increasing recognition that children’s learning of mathematics is linked not only to their academic skills (math skills/ability), but also to their cognitive beliefs about themselves (“I can do math”), as well as their affective evaluations about math (“I enjoy math”). Previous studies have demonstrated that cognitive beliefs are related to math achievement (Cvencek et al., 2015), and an increasing number of studies are beginning to highlight the unique role of affective evaluations on students’ math achievement (Chen et al., 2018). It is possible that affective evaluations are related to academic achievement in elementary school, but the evidence is currently lacking due to the scarcity of instruments that are precise enough for use with youngest ages (Marsh et al., 2006). However, studies that simultaneously investigate both cognitive beliefs and affective evaluations in the same children are rare and limited to middle- or high-school students (Pinxten, et al., 2012). Therefore, there is a need for empirical studies measuring both cognitive beliefs and affective evaluations about math in the same students during early elementary school. A sample of 391 Croatian Grade 1 and Grade 5 students (195 girls) completed measures of math attitudes, math self-concepts, and self- esteem. Both explicit and implicit measures were employed. For the explicit measure, three standard scales were used: Students completed (a) TIMSS 2015 questionnaire as a measure of math attitudes, (b) items from the “ST42” survey of the PISA 2012 questionnaire as a measure of math self- concepts, and (c) Global Scale of the Self- Perception Profile for Children (Harter, 1982) as a measure of global self-esteem. For the implicit measures, the Child Implicit Association Test (ChIAT) was used which is an adaptation of the adult tests that evaluate social biases using nonverbal methods (Cvencek et al. 2011). The underlying principle of the ChIAT is that children find certain associations to be more natural, and they respond to them faster. For example, if children think of themselves as a math person, they will respond more quickly to me = math than to other control pairings. Importantly, we also measured the same students’ math and verbal achievement, using math and language grades. Hierarchical regressions showed that explicit beliefs and evaluations about math were strongly related to both math and verbal achievement (βs > .23, ps <.001). Implicit evaluations were related to math achievement over and above the implicit beliefs (β = .14, p < .05). Explicit and implicit selfesteem were both related to composite math– verbal achievement (βs > .13, ps < .01). Collectively, results show that implicit and explicit measures of students’ beliefs and evaluations about math and self are useful in understanding individual variation in early math and verbal achievement. The data show that for children—as with adults— participants’ implicit versus explicit attitudes and self-concepts sometimes diverge. The relevance for theory and the design of interventions targeting multiple non-academic factors about math in elementary school will be discussed.

Implicit and Explicit Beliefs ; Evaluations ; Math ; Self Predict Math and Verbal Achievement

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