Cognitive and non-cognitive predictors of academic success in higher education: a large-scale longitudinal study

Abstract

How important are learning strategies or personal attributes for learning outside of domain-specific knowledge or twenty-first-century transversal skills when predicting academic success in higher education? To address this question, we conducted a longitudinal study among 1,681 students at one of the leading universities in Hungary. Students took four tests and questionnaires when they entered the university. They measured knowledge from their previous studies (reading and mathematics), twenty-first-century skills like problem-solving and non-cognitive variables in learning strategies, motivation and attitudes. In the next five years, we followed their academic progress with the aim of detecting cognitive and non-cognitive predictors of academic success toward obtaining a degree and developing training programmes for the most important predictors to boost the probability of academic success. The overarching model, which was controlled for students’ socio-economic background, determined 18.4% of the variance in later academic success. Domain-specific knowledge from previous studies and learning motivation emerged as the strongest predictor, learning strategies proved to be the most stable of the other mediating factors as an independent predictor, and twenty-first-century transversal skills proved to be unimportant in earning a university degree. Results highlight the importance of transforming higher education so that it is consistent with the expectations of the twenty-first-century labour market, a future-fit education in Hungary.