"Youth’s developing work habits from middle childhood to early adolescence: Cascading effects for academic outcomes in adolescence and early adulthood"

​Professor Sandra Simpkins (right), alumnus Nestor Tulagan (Ph.D. ’20), third-year doctoral student Glona Lee, Ting-Lan Ma (assistant professor, Edgewood College), Nicole Zarrett (associate professor, University of South Carolina), and Chancellor’s Professor Emerita Deborah Lowe Vandell published an article in Developmental Psychology on youth’s self-management skills and subsequent academic success.

The title of the article is “Youth’s developing work habits from middle childhood to early adolescence: Cascading effects for academic outcomes in adolescence and early adulthood.”

Simpkins is a developmental psychologist, studying child and adolescent development. She researches how families, friendships, and social position factors (such as ethnicity and culture) shape adolescents’ organized after-school activities and motivation. She is currently working on research focused on the positive outcomes of youth’s participation in activities as well as the predictors and correlates of high school students’ STEM motivational beliefs. She is co-PI on grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation that study how organized after-school activities support positive development from childhood through young adulthood. Simpkins directs the Center for After School and Summer Excellence (CASE) and Project REACH and co-directs the After School Activities Project.. 

Tulagan is National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow studying family influences on Latinx middle schoolers’ math motivational beliefs and performance. As a student in the school’s Ph.D. in Education program, Tulagan specialized in Human Development in Context (HDiC). His dissertation research examined the role of stage-environment fit in the socialization strategies that African American mothers implement to foster seventh graders’ academic achievement. Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Eccles served as his advisor.

Lee’s research foci include motivation and academic achievement, adolescent development, diversity and equity in education, resilience processes, and social interactions. She investigates the roles that social agents play in immigrant youths’ adaptation to their new environment and ways to foster their well-being. She is advised by specializing in Human Development in Context. She also is working on the project funded by Mott Foundation to examine after-school quality and Templeton Character Development project with her advisor Simpkins and Vandell.

Vandell served as the Founding Dean of UCI's School of Education and is one of the principal investigators of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Her work is viewed by many social scientists as one of the most comprehensive studies of the short-term and long-term effects of early education programs, schooling, and the family on children’s development. She is the author of more than 150 articles and three books.

Abstract
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Children’s work habits at school include being a hard worker, turning in work on time, following classroom rules, and putting forward one’s best effort. Models on youth character, noncognitive skills, and social-emotional learning suggest that self-management skills like work habits are critical for individuals’ subsequent academic success. Using data from 1,124 children in the NICHD Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development (49% female; 77% White), we examined children’s developing work habits from first to sixth grade and their developmental cascading effects on academic outcomes at the beginning and end of high school as well as at age 26. The findings on differential stability of work habits (i.e., bivariate correlations) suggest that children were likely to maintain their relative position among peers from first to sixth grade. The complementary findings on mean-level changes from the latent growth curves suggest that children’s work habits exhibited mean-level increases over the same period, meaning that children’s work habits became more advanced from first to sixth grade. Models used to examine the developmental cascades of work habits suggest that children’s work habits at first grade and the growth in children’s work habits from first to sixth grade (a) directly predicted their academic outcomes at the beginning and the end of high school, and (b) indirectly predicted their educational attainment at age 26 through their academic outcomes during adolescence. These findings underscore the importance of foundational noncognitive skills during middle childhood that predict individuals’ academic outcomes up to 20 years later in adulthood.