Prediction of academic achievement by cognitive and socio-emotional variables: A systematic review of literature

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine the scientific production about the prediction of academic achievement by means of cognitive and socio-emotional variables through a systematic literature review involving empirical articles. The search was carried out in the SciELO, Pepsic and Capes journal databases, covering the period from 2008 to 2018. Twenty six articles that met the pre-established inclusion criteria were analyzed. Intelligence was the most frequent variable in the studies (n = 7) and explained between 1.21% and 43% of school achievement. Some socio-emotional variables had greater predictive power than intelligence: self-regulation (49 to 90%), satisfaction with the learning process (79.21%), self-efficacy (2.56 to 44.89%) and learning engagement, 6.76 to 44.89%). Based on the literature, we can conclude that academic achievement is multi-determined, with influence from different cognitive and socio-emotional variables. Future studies need to consider the use of standardized achievement measures to enhance comparability, as well as to construct models with multiple variables and their correlations for the sake of a deeper investigation of the impacts of these relationships on achievement along the school career.