Not All Factors Contribute Equally to European-American and Hispanic Students' SAT Scores.

Brenda Hannon

doi:10.3390/jintelligence7030018

Abstract

This exploratory study shows that the contributions of cognitive, metacognitive awareness, performance avoidance, test anxiety, and socioeconomic family background factors to SAT scores (i.e., overall SAT, SAT-V, SAT-M) may vary as a function of ethnicity (i.e., European-American, Hispanic). Four hundred and fifty-seven students, 282 European-American and 175 Hispanic, completed multiple measures of cognitive, metacognitive awareness, social/personality (i.e., test anxiety, performance avoidance, academic self-efficacy), and socioeconomic family background factors, which were used in regression analyses predicting overall SAT, SAT-V, and SAT-M scores. The results show that most factors contributed significantly to overall SAT, SAT-M, and SAT-V scores. In addition, the ethnicity X test anxiety interaction was significant for all three SAT measures, a finding that suggests ethnic differences in the contributions of test anxiety to overall SAT, SAT-M, and SAT-V scores. For European-American students, test anxiety had no influence on overall SAT and SAT-M scores, whereas for Hispanic students test anxiety had a negative influence on overall SAT and SAT-M scores. For SAT-V scores, interpreting the ethnicity X test anxiety interaction was more complicated because both the significant main effect of test anxiety and the ethnicity X test anxiety interaction must be interpreted together. Whereas test anxiety negatively influenced European-Americans’ SAT-V scores, this negative influence was less than the influence it had on Hispanic students’ SAT-V scores. Indeed, for Hispanic students with high test anxiety, this negative influence was profound. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that any theory explaining the SAT may need to take into account multiple predictors as well as the possibility that the contributions of these predictors may vary as a function of ethnicity.

Highlights

According to a recent survey, most institutions of higher education in the United States consider scores on the SAT to be of “considerable” or “moderate” importance in college/university admissions [1,2]
The results are reported in four sections: (i) data screening, (ii) the descriptive statistics and correlational analysis for the group data, (iii) the descriptive statistics and correlational analysis for each ethnic group (i.e., European-Americans, Hispanics), and (iv) the regression analyses that determined the contributions of cognitive, metacognitive awareness, test anxiety, performance avoidance, academic self-efficacy, and socioeconomic predictors to overall SAT, SAT-M, and SAT-V scores as a function of ethnicity
(i.e., working memory, knowledge integration), metacognitive awareness, social/ personality and SES factors to European-American and Hispanic students’ overall SAT, SAT-M, and SAT-V scores. Do all of these factors contribute to the SAT scores of European-American versus Hispanic students to the same extent? The present study showed that cognitive and non-cognitive factors contribute to overall SAT, SAT-M, and SAT-V scores

Summary

Introduction

According to a recent survey, most institutions of higher education in the United States consider scores on the SAT Aptitude Test but is just called the SAT) to be of “considerable” or “moderate” importance in college/university admissions [1,2]. As important as the SAT is, uncertainty about its construct validity and large gender and ethnic differences still persist. It is this latter concern—ethnic differences in SAT scores—that is of primary interest to the present paper. The non-cognitive factors examined here were: (i) metacognitive awareness, which pertains to beliefs about knowledge and learning, (ii) social/personality factors, which are factors that affect personality, attitudes, and/or lifestyle

Methods

Results

Conclusion