Past and future academic experiences are related with present scholastic achievement when intelligence is controlled

Here the simultaneous relationships among cognitive ability (CA), past academic failure (PAF), future academic aspirations (FAA), and present scholastic achievement (PSA) were investigated. For addressing these rarely considered relations, two independent representative samples comprising 2796 students were analyzed; the first sample (young adolescents) included 1695 students from the third cycle of elementary school, whereas the second sample (old adolescents) comprised 1101 students from secondary school. SEM (structural equation model) analyses were computed and the main findings revealed that (1) CA, PAF, and FAA predict PSA, (2) CA is the best predictor of PSA, and (3) excluding PAF and FAA from the final SEM model produces a substantial reduction in the achieved predictive validity, especially for Language.