| title: | Mental development of Estonian school-children and factors affecting academic achievement |
|---|---|
| reg no: | ETF5677 |
| project type: | Estonian Science Foundation research grant |
| subject: |
5.5. Pedagogy 5.6. Psychology |
| status: | accepted |
| institution: | TU Faculty of Social Sciences |
| head of project: | Jüri Allik |
| duration: | 01.01.2004 - 31.12.2006 |
| description: | The main goal of the project is to explore developmental trajectory of mental abilities of Estonian school-children and analyse to what extent their academic achievement depends on their level of intelligence and personality characteristics such as personality dispositions, self-esteem and motivation. The current project will focus on following research goals: * The establishment of national age-norms of intelligence. The purpose of this subgoal is to establish the gender and age-norms of general mental abilities representative to the population of Estonian school-children (from 7 to 18 years) on the basis of the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM). SPM is one of the most popular and highly valued assessment tools to measure psychometrically general cognitive abilities of children and adolescents. * Change and stability of mental abilities. The second aim is to study the temporal stability of general mental abilities as measured by SPM. The extent of changes in level and structure of intelligence will be explored using test-retest method where the same participants will be re-tested in process of two years. * Academic achievement as a function of mental abilities, personality and social context. In this study, several psychological factors will be examined as possible deteminants of academic achievement. According to the hypothesis, mental abilities, personality traits (included self-esteem and motivation) and also social-cultural factors may have a significant effect on academic achievement. To control the hypothesis, several regional (different country regions) and life-conditional (countryside versus city) influences are intended to investigate. |
| project group | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | name | institution | position | |
| 1. | Jüri Allik | TU Faculty of Social Sciences | professor | |
| 2. | Kaia Laidra | Tartu Ülikool | laborant, doktorant | |
| 3. | Helle Pullmann | Tartu Ülikool | projektijuht, doktorant | |