Math items about real-world content lower test-scores of students from families with low socioeconomic status.

In many countries, standardized math tests are important for achieving academic success. Here, we examine whether content of items, the story that explains a mathematical question, biases performance of low-SES students. In a large-scale cohort study of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS)-including data from 58 countries from students in grades 4 and 8 (N = 5501,165)-we examine whether item content that is more likely related to challenges for low-SES students (money, food, social relationships) improves their performance, compared with their average math performance. Results show that low-SES students scored lower on items with this specific content than expected based on an individual's average performance. The effect sizes are substantial: on average, the chance to answer correctly is 18% lower. From a hidden talents approach, these results are unexpected. However, they align with other theoretical frameworks such as scarcity mindset, providing new insights for fair testing.

Qualitative data on triggers and coping of sensory hypersensitivity in acquired brain injury patients: A proposed model.

Sensory hypersensitivity (SHS) is a frequently heard complaint after acquired brain injury (ABI) and is related to reduced quality of life and physical and mental health. This study aimed to identify triggers for SHS after ABI and investigate how individuals cope with SHS. Nineteen adults with ABI took part in 45-min individual interviews. Data were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Inductive thematic analysis revealed five themes: (1) A mismatch between resources and demands, (2) Altered experience of ordinary stimuli, (3) It affects all aspects of living, (4) Avoid, approach, accept, (5) It's highly heterogeneous. A model explaining the impact of triggers on subjective SHS after ABI is proposed, which states that SHS arises from a mismatch between the demands of a sensory environment (triggers) and the available biopsychosocial resources of an individual to meet these demands. The elicited SHS can affect and be affected by levels of fatigue, which limits the resources and creates a loop. Coping strategies can act on various stages of this model, i.e., to reduce the mismatch and potentially alter the loop. This model can contribute to the identification of mechanisms behind SHS in ABI patients and other populations, ultimately leading to evidence-based treatments.

Instructing children to construct ideas into products alters children's creative idea selection in a randomized field experiment.

Many popular pedagogical approaches instruct children to construct their ideas into tangible and physical products. With the prospect of implementation, do children decide to go for the most creative ideas or do they shift towards ideas that are perhaps less creative but easier to construct? We conducted a field experiment to test whether expected construction affects children's creative idea selection. In this experiment, 403 children were asked to select the most original ideas to make a toy elephant more fun to play with. We randomly assigned them to a treatment condition-in which they were informed they had to construct one of the original ideas that they selected-and a control group-in which children were informed that, after idea selection, they had to perform another task. Children who were instructed to construct the selected idea into a tangible product turned a blind eye to original ideas and preferred the more feasible ideas. Thus, pedagogical approaches that aim to stimulate creativity by instructing children to construct original ideas into tangible and physical products may unintentionally change children's choices for creative ideas. This finding highlights the importance for educators of guiding children's decision-making process in creative problem solving, and to be aware of children's bias against original ideas when designing creative assignments for them.

The role of personality in the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of students in Germany during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We examined how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of 6,957 students from Germany, assessed between March 16 and April 21, 2020, when COVID-19 became a serious health concern in Germany, varied by personality. The Big Five personality traits-openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability-were assessed with the International Personality Item Pool. Students were asked whether they kept up with the COVID-19 news, followed specific governmental rules and recommendations (washing hands more, using public transport less, avoiding larger crowds, and restricting meetings with family/friends), hoarded supplies, felt less secure in public places, or expected financial losses due to the crisis. Logistic regressions adjusted for sociodemographic factors and cognitive abilities revealed that more conscientious (odds ratio (OR) = 1.133) and more agreeable (OR = 1.285) students kept up with the news more. More agreeable students were also more likely to wash their hands more often/intensively (OR = 1.262), use public transport less (OR = 1.182), avoid crowds (OR = 1.320), and restrict meetings with family/friends (OR = 1.410). Other Big Five traits were not associated with these behaviors, except that less emotionally stable individuals tended to use public transport less often (OR = 1.162). Additionally, less emotionally stable students, in particular, more often bought more supplies than usual (OR = 1.322), felt insecure in public spaces (OR = 1.597), and expected financial losses (OR = 1.270). Moreover, less open (OR = 0.876) and more conscientious (OR = 1.235) students more often felt insecure in public spaces, and more extraverted individuals more often expected financial losses (OR = 1.180). Taken together, our findings suggest that more agreeable individuals, in particular, tend to comply with governmental rules and recommendations to fight COVID-19, whereas less emotionally stable individuals, in particular, tend to hoard supplies, feel insecure, and fear financial losses due to the crisis.

Is There a Rise in the Importance of Socioemotional Skills in the Labor Market? Evidence From a Trend Study Among College Graduates.

In this study, we examine whether socioemotional skills have become more important in the labor market within the past 14 years. To this end, we analyze data from a unique dataset on recent graduates from Dutch professional colleges (N = 67,000). Two different indicators of skill change are investigated, namely changes in the skill level required in the labor market and changes in the wage returns to these skills. The results indicate that socioemotional skills related to knowledge and innovation such as logical reasoning and information gathering, as well as skills related to working to plan and collaboration, have undergone a significant increase in terms of labor market requirements. We also observe an increase in the required level of the work-related skills digital literacy and occupation-specific knowledge. However, significant increases in wage returns are only observed for socioemotional skills related to knowledge and innovation. The labor market importance of socioemotional skills appears to be only modestly affected by business cycle effects.

The long-run effects of secondary school track assignment.

This study analyzes the long-run effects of secondary school track assignment for students at the achievement margin. Theoretically, track assignment maximizes individual outcomes when thresholds between tracks are set at the level of the indifferent student, and any other thresholds would imply that students at or around the margin are better off by switching tracks. We exploit non-linearities in the probability of track assignment across achievement to empirically identify the effect of track assignment on educational attainment and wages of students in the Netherlands, who can be assigned to four different tracks. We find that attending higher tracks leads to increases in years of schooling by around 1.5 years for students at the lowest and the highest choice margin, and wage gains of around 15% and 5%, respectively. For the margin between the two middle tracks, attending the higher of the two tracks has no effect on educational attainment and decreases wages by around 12%. The negative returns for the medium margin and the relatively low returns for the higher margin (compared to the required educational investments) are partly mediated by motivation and study choice.

Low-Income Students in Higher Education: Undermatching Predicts Decreased Satisfaction toward the Final Stage in College.

It is undesirable when students attend institutions that are less selective than their academic credentials would permit (i.e., undermatching) because of the long-term consequences for their job opportunities and wages, in particular for students from low-socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds. Undermatching may also affect students' satisfaction during college. Research from a life course perspective shows that subjective experiences during college may have long-term impact on adolescents' development. However, little is known about the relation between undermatching and students' subjective experiences during their years in college, and about whether this relation is moderated by SES. From an academic misalignment perspective, undermatching may lead to less satisfaction because undermatched students are not maximizing their potential. However, from a social misalignment perspective, experiences of social mismatch when low-SES students enter the most selective institutions are well documented, and such mismatch may be less pronounced in less selective institutions. Consequently, there may be a positive relation between undermatching and satisfaction with the social environment for low-SES students. The current study tested these relations by using propensity score matching (PSM) to analyse the association between undermatching, SES, and satisfaction among 21,452 respondents (67% female) among 1st, 2nd, 3th, and 4th year college students from a cohort study among students in the Netherlands (Dutch Student Monitor), all of whom were eligible for the most selective institutions. The results indicated a negative relation between undermatching and satisfaction with the social and academic environment, both for low- and high-SES students. The negative relation between undermatching and both forms of satisfaction increases toward the last year in college, especially for low-SES students. This lowered satisfaction in the final stage in higher education implies that the negative consequences of undermatching become more pronounced after students have become more integrated in their colleges. These findings have important implications for the understanding about undermatching in relation to students' development and for the formulation of policies and programs for promoting social mobility.

Explaining Children's Life Outcomes: Parental Socioeconomic Status, Intelligence and Neurocognitive Factors in a Dynamic Life Cycle Model.

The goal of the present paper is to introduce a dynamic life cycle model that explains the reproduction of wealth and health over generations by introducing knowledge from cognitive neuroscience into the existing knowledge from the socioeconomic literature. The socioeconomic literature successfully identified the major role of socioeconomic status of parents, both as a direct and indirect effect, in the shaping and intergenerational reproduction of wealth and health. Furthermore, the importance of cognitive abilities as actor in this process has been widely studied in socioeconomic literature. A third factor that has been identified by the socioeconomic discipline is the so-called non-cognitive capabilities. This category, however, lacks a clear definition and seems to be a catchall for a collection of factors. Within the repository of these non-cognitive capabilities the construct of executive functions is an interesting and important contribution from cognitive neuroscience. The multidimensional construct of executive functioning or cognitive control (i.e. planning and formulation of objectives) and monitoring processes (i.e. influences the execution of these goals) is a valuable addition to a framework on reproduction of wealth and health over generations, because executive functions are sensitive to training. Merging insights of the socioeconomic literature and cognitive neuroscience in a life cycle model opens the opportunity of educational initiatives with regard to executive functions to break the intergenerational reproduction of poverty and deprivation.

What grades and achievement tests measure.

Intelligence quotient (IQ), grades, and scores on achievement tests are widely used as measures of cognition, but the correlations among them are far from perfect. This paper uses a variety of datasets to show that personality and IQ predict grades and scores on achievement tests. Personality is relatively more important in predicting grades than scores on achievement tests. IQ is relatively more important in predicting scores on achievement tests. Personality is generally more predictive than IQ on a variety of important life outcomes. Both grades and achievement tests are substantially better predictors of important life outcomes than IQ. The reason is that both capture personality traits that have independent predictive power beyond that of IQ.

Does Expert Advice Improve Educational Choice?

This paper reports evidence that an individual meeting with a study counselor at high school significantly improves the quality of choice of tertiary educational field, as self-assessed 18 months after graduation from college. To address endogeneity, we explore the variation in study counseling practices between schools as an instrumental variable (IV). Following careful scrutiny of the validity of the IV, our results indicate a significant and positive influence of study counseling on the quality of educational choice, foremost among males and those with low educated parents. The overall result is stable across a number of robustness checks.

School Quality and the Development of Cognitive Skills between Age Four and Six.

This paper studies the extent to which young children develop their cognitive ability in high and low quality schools. We use a representative panel data set containing cognitive test scores of 4-6 year olds in Dutch schools. School quality is measured by the school's average achievement test score at age 12. Our results indicate that children in high-quality schools develop their skills substantially faster than those in low-quality schools. The results remain robust to the inclusion of initial ability, parental background, and neighborhood controls. Moreover, using proximity to higher-achieving schools as an instrument for school choice corroborates the results. The robustness of the results points toward a causal interpretation, although it is not possible to erase all doubt about unobserved confounding factors.

Identification Problems in Personality Psychology.

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures are determined by these multiple traits and do not identify any particular trait unless incentives and other traits are controlled for. Using two data sets, we show, as an example, that substantial portions of the variance in achievement test scores and grades, which are often used as measures of cognition, are explained by personality variables.

Time discounting and the body mass index. Evidence from the Netherlands.

In many Western countries, the relative weight of people -- measured by the body mass index (BMI) -- has increased substantially in recent years, leading to an increasing incidence of overweight and related health problems. As with many forms of risky behavior, it is plausible that overweight is related to the individual discount rate. Increases in credit card debts, the rise in gambling and the development of a more hedonic life style, suggest that the average discount rate has increased over time. An increase in time discounting may be a contributing factor in the rise in BMI. Applying a large set of indicators for the individual discount rate from a Dutch survey, this paper analyzes whether changes in time discounting can account for differences in body mass between individuals at a given point in time and whether changes in the average individual discount rate can explain the remarkable increase in BMI experienced in recent years in the Netherlands. We find some evidence for a link between time discounting and differences in BMI between people, but this relationship depends strongly on the choice of the proxy for the discount rate. Giving our hypothesis the best chance, we analyze the development of the time discounting proxies that are most strongly related to BMI. We find no evidence for a change of these proxies over time. Our main conclusion therefore is that overweight might be related to the way people discount future health benefits, but the increase in BMI is more likely explained by shifts in other parameters that determine the intertemporal decisions regarding the trade-off of current and future health and satisfaction.