Ability self-concepts and parental support may protect adolescents when they experience low support from their math teachers.

INTRODUCTION: Experiencing low support from teachers can be associated with low academic achievement. Nonetheless, individual- (i.e., ability self-concepts) and contextual-level (i.e., parental support) protective factors may help adolescents to display academic resilience. This study examined whether high school students' math ability self-concepts and parental support can mitigate the possible negative association between perceived low math teacher support and their math achievement. METHOD: Correlational data were drawn from the High School Longitudinal Study (N = 14,580, Mage = 17.42 in 11th grade, 51% female), a nationally representative study of high school students in the U.S. The measures of protective factors (i.e., math ability self-concepts and parental support) were obtained from the surveys administered to students and parents in 9th grade. Students' perceived teacher support and their math achievement score were measured in 11th grade. A series of linear regression analyses were estimated to test our hypotheses. RESULTS & CONCLUSIONS: Perceived low teacher support was negatively associated with adolescents' math achievement. Adolescents' math ability self-concepts were directly and positively associated with their math achievement. The interaction between perceived low teacher support and ability self-concepts in predicting adolescents' achievement varied by parental support. The association between perceived low teacher support and adolescents' math achievement was not statistically significant when adolescents were high on one of the protective factors. That is, high parental support may be protective for adolescents with low math ability self-concepts. This study highlights the interaction between adolescents' academic motivation and parental support in demonstrating resilience to perceived low teacher support.

Children's developing work habits from middle childhood to early adolescence: Cascading effects for academic outcomes in adolescence and adulthood.

Children's work habits at school include being a hard worker, turning in work on time, following classroom rules, and putting forward one's best effort. Models on youth character, noncognitive skills, and social-emotional learning suggest that self-management skills like work habits are critical for individuals' subsequent academic success. Using data from 1,124 children in the NICHD Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development (49% female; 77% White), we examined children's developing work habits from first to sixth grade and their developmental cascading effects on academic outcomes at the beginning and end of high school as well as at age 26. The findings on differential stability of work habits (i.e., bivariate correlations) suggest that children were likely to maintain their relative position among peers from first to sixth grade. The complementary findings on mean-level changes from the latent growth curves suggest that children's work habits exhibited mean-level increases over the same period, meaning that children's work habits became more advanced from first to sixth grade. Models used to examine the developmental cascades of work habits suggest that children's work habits at first grade and the growth in children's work habits from first to sixth grade (a) directly predicted their academic outcomes at the beginning and the end of high school, and (b) indirectly predicted their educational attainment at age 26 through their academic outcomes during adolescence. These findings underscore the importance of foundational noncognitive skills during middle childhood that predict individuals' academic outcomes up to 20 years later in adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).