Intellectual Curiosity, Confidence Can Help Kids Excel in Math

For children low in math and reading skills, characteristics such as openness, intellectual curiosity can help them.

For children low in math and reading skills, characteristics such as openness, intellectual curiosity and confidence can help them, finds a new research.

Proficiency in reading and math is associated with a complex system of skills, some of which derive from personality traits.

The study found that characteristics related to openness, such as intellectual curiosity and confidence, made children more adept at taking on math and reading than characteristics describing conscientiousness, such as diligence and perseverance.

Our findings provide additional knowledge on the complex set of skills that interact and give rise to differences in academic achievement between children, as well as the complexity of genetic architecture of academic achievement, which is made of many parts beyond intellect. 

Margherita Malanchini, Lead Author, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas (UT) - Austin in the US

In prior studies, differences in academic skills have been linked to differences in self-regulation, or how well children can control their behaviour and internal states against a backdrop of conflicting or distracting situations, drives and impulses.

However, self-regulation is a very broad construct, incorporating both intellectual abilities, such as executive functioning, and personality traits such as conscientiousness, researchers said.

For the study, researchers collected data on 1,019 children, aged 8-14 years.

After accounting for intelligence, researchers found a strong link between executive functioning - the ability to plan, organise and complete tasks - and proficiency in reading and math.

This link was largely explained by shared genetic factors by 60 per cent and environmental factors by 40 per cent, the researchers noted in the paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“This indicates that some of the genetic factors that predispose children to do well in school are also the same genetic factors that predispose children to be more open to new challenges, creative, intellectually curious and confident in their own academic ability,” said Tucker-Drob, research associate at the UT in the US.