Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Starr, Alexandra
• Haider, Zainab F.
• von Stumm, Sophie
• Pérez-Edgar, Koraly

Titel

Do School Grades Matter for Growing Up? Testing the Predictive Validity of School Performance for Outcomes in Emerging Adulthood

Ist Teil von

• Developmental psychology, 2024-04, Vol.60 (4), p.665-679

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In putatively meritocratic societies, doing well in school is a pivotal precondition for accessing further and higher education, which, in turn, has a pervasive, long-term influence on adulthood development. Yet, doing well in school may also predict "real-life success" outside formal education settings and independent of the educational qualifications that a person attains. Such predictions are likely to become salient during emerging adulthood, a life period characterized by career explorations and social-emotional adjustment. Here, we tested the predictive validity of end-of-compulsory school grades at age 16 years in a U.K.-representative population cohort sample of up to N = 6,488, who were born between 1994 and 1996, for a broad range of occupational, financial, and social-emotional outcomes at age 23. End-of-compulsory school performance accounted for 1%-20% of the variance across occupational, financial, and social-emotional outcomes in emerging adulthood. Educational attainment attenuated these associations only slightly, with school grades at age 16 accounting for variance in emerging adulthood outcomes independent of later educational attainment. We found that school grades were equally predictive for boys' and girls' outcomes. In children from lower family socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, school grades were more predictive of their educational attainment, financial attitudes, and anxiety compared to higher SES children, with varying effect sizes (i.e., 0.3%-4.2%). Our findings suggest that school-leaving grades facilitate the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood, independent of educational attainment, and that they might enable children from low-SES families to compensate for some of their background disadvantages. Public Significance StatementThe findings from this study indicate that school grades are important predictors for a wide range of financial, occupational, and social-emotional development in emerging adulthood, independent of an individual's highest educational qualification. In particular, school performance is more predictive of educational attainment for students from under-resourced backgrounds, suggesting that good grades may be a key factor in compensating for family background disadvantages.