Abstract
Academic achievement has been found to have a pervasive and substantial impact on a wide range of developmental outcomes and has also been implicated in the critical transition from adolescence into early adulthood. Previous research has revealed that self-reported grades tend to diverge from official transcript grade point average (GPA) scores, with students being more likely to report inflated scores. Making use of a sample of monozygotic twin (N = 282 pairs), dizygotic twin (N = 441 pairs), and full sibling (N = 1,757 pairs) pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; 65 % White; 50 % male; mean age = 16.14), the current study is the first to investigate the role that genetic and environmental factors play in misreporting grade information. A comparison between self-reported GPA (mean score of 2.86) and official transcript GPA scores (mean score of 2.44) revealed that self-reported scores were approximately one-half letter grade greater than official scores. Liability threshold models revealed that additive genetic influences explained between 40 and 63 % of the variance in reporting inflated grades and correctly reporting GPA, with the remaining variance explained by the nonshared environment. Conversely, 100 % of the variance in reporting deflated grade information was explained by nonshared environmental influences. In an effort to identify specific nonshared environmental influences on reporting accuracy, multivariate models that adequately control for genetic influences were estimated and revealed that siblings with lower transcript GPA scores were significantly less likely to correctly report their GPA and significantly more likely to report inflated GPA scores. Additional analyses revealed that verbal IQ and self-control were not significantly associated with self-reported GPA accuracy after controlling for genetic influences. These findings indicate that previous studies that implicate verbal IQ and self-control as significant predictors of misreporting grade information may have been the result of model misspecification and genetic confounding. The findings from the current study indicate that genetic influences play a crucial role in the accuracy in which grade information is reported, but that nonshared environmental influences also play a significant role in specific circumstances. The theoretical and methodological implications of the results are discussed.
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Notes
Importantly, these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive and may simultaneously contribute to variation in misreporting. Unfortunately, the employed biometric model-fitting techniques do not allow nonshared environmental influences to be effectively separated from error making it impossible to estimate the proportion of E that can be attributed to each.
The AHAA only included transcript GPA information for classes completed during high school and did not include transcript information for classes during middle school. Keep in mind, during the first and second waves of data collection a significant proportion of the students included in the Add Health study were enrolled in middle school. Additionally, participants in the Add Health study were only asked to provide self-reported GPA information during the first two waves of the study, making self-report and official transcript GPA scores only available for respondents who were enrolled in high school during the first two waves of the Add Health study. In this way, it is only possible to directly compare self-report and transcript GPA measures for a small subset of the overall sample, a problem that is further exacerbated by limiting the sample to twin and sibling pairs (a necessary feature of biometric model-fitting techniques). For these reasons, the analysis was limited to wave 1 self-report and transcript GPA measures. While both GPA measures are available at wave 2, a significant reduction in statistical power stemming from a combination of missing data and students transitioning out of high school limited the analysis to wave 1 measures only.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the five anonymous reviewers and Dr. Roger Levesque for their extremely helpful suggestions and comments. The authors also wish to thank Rich Jones for his development of the runmplus module which allows users to run the statistical program Mplus from within Stata (for more information visit http://www.lvmworkshop.org/home/runmplus-stuff). The AHAA study was funded by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (01 HD40428-02) to the Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Chandra Muller (PI), and from the National Science Foundation (REC-0126167) to the Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Chandra Muller and Pedro Reyes (Co-PI). This research also uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.
Author contributions
JAS conceived of the study, performed the statistical analyses, created the tables and figure, and drafted the manuscript. KMB assisted with the interpretation of the analyses and helped draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Schwartz, J.A., Beaver, K.M. Making (Up) the Grade? Estimating the Genetic and Environmental Influences of Discrepancies Between Self-reported Grades and Official GPA Scores. J Youth Adolescence 44, 1125–1138 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0185-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0185-9