Lynn (2010a, 2010b) argued that individuals from south Italy have a lower IQ than individuals from north Italy, and that these differences in IQ are at the basis of north-south gap in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy. In the present paper, we discuss several theoretical and methodological aspects which we regard as flaws…

In the multiple intelligence framework, newer and more contextualized cognitive tasks are suggested as alternative to more traditional psychometric tests. The purpose of this article is to examine whether or not these two types of instruments converge into a general factor of cognitive performance. Thus, the Battery of General and Differential…

Studies on the interface between cognitive ability (intelligence) and personality in the prediction of academic performance have yielded mixed results so far. Especially an interaction between conscientiousness (and its facet achievement striving) and intelligence has been investigated. The hypothesis is that conscientiousness enhances the impact…

Children's symbolic number sense was examined at the beginning of first grade with a short screen of competencies related to counting, number knowledge, and arithmetic operations. Conventional mathematics achievement was then assessed at the end of both first and third grades. Controlling for age and cognitive abilities (i.e., language, spatial,…

The first objective of this study was to establish the relation between intellectual ability and metacognitive skillfulness as predictors of learning performance in young students (aged 12 years). Furthermore, the generality vs. domain-specificity of metacognitive skillfulness was investigated. Thirty-two first-year secondary-school students…

Past research has consistently shown that there is a relation between personality and academic performance, but much less work has focused on explaining this relation. The present study examined whether three aspects of homework behavior, namely homework time, procrastination, and learning strategies, mediate the relation between personality and…

Native-born Estonian men (N = 1495), 18-23 years old, participated in a study on relationships between the level of education and noncognitive characteristics of mind (so-called Characteristic Adaptations: attitudes, values, self-concept, etc.). In addition to Characteristic Adaptations, the model included parents' level of education, personality…

This study investigates the relationships of domain-general cognitive abilities and domain-specific verbal and mathematical abilities to students' educational characteristics when two theoretically grounded, but competing structural models are applied. In the standard model, a single latent ability causes interindividual differences in the…

This study examined the predictors of belief bias in a formal reasoning paradigm (a syllogistic reasoning task) and myside bias in two informal reasoning paradigms (an argument generation task and an experiment evaluation task). Neither cognitive ability nor thinking dispositions predicted myside bias, but both cognitive ability and thinking…

This study adopted a person-centered approach to examine organized patterns of psychological factors and their relations to achievement and engagement in a sample of high school students. Four types of students characterized by unique configurations of cognitive, motivational, and affective characteristics were identified in both the male and…

Current approaches in intelligence research indicate the need for a more extensive determination of characteristics of children with possible giftedness, not only at an intellectual level, but also at the level of self-regulation and motivation. The present study compares self-regulation efficiency between high-IQ and average-ability children aged…

High-achieving (HA) and low-achieving (LA), learning disabled (LD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) high school students were followed over two years of L2 study and compared on measures of L1 literacy (reading and writing) in elementary school, L1 cognitive ability, L2 aptitude, oral and written L2 proficiency, and L2 word…

This study examined test-related experiences of enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom in a sample of 2059 German school students (50% female) from grade 6, and how they relate to students' abstract reasoning ability (ARA). Emotions were assessed immediately before, during, and after a mathematics achievement test. Analysis of variance showed that…

College students (Experiment 1) and non-college adults (Experiment 2) studied a computer-based 31-frame lesson on electronics that offered help-screens containing text (text group) or illustrations (pictorial group), and then took a learning test. Participants also took a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the verbalizer-visualizer…