Abstract

BARRIGAS, Carlos  and  FRAGOSO, Isabel. Maturity, academic performance, reasoning ability and socio-economic status in 6 and 13 years old children from lisbon. Rev. Port. de Educação [online]. 2012, vol.25, n.1, pp.193-215. ISSN 0871-9187.

This essay intends to evaluate the association between maturity, academic performance (AP), reasoning ability (RA) and socio-economic status (SES) in a sample of 792 children (394 boys and 398 girls), with ages between 6 and 13 years old. Maturity was estimated through the bone age (Tanner et al., 2001) and the academic performance was obtained through inquiries to teachers, results of school tests and the levels achieved during the second term. The socio-economical status (SES) was estimated through the Graffar Scale (Graffar, 1958) and the reasoning ability (RA) by using the test of Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices (Raven, 1963). These data were handled with the program SPSS 17.0 (p=.05). We verified that the AP was directly related to the SES, that the boys’ RA was higher than the girls’, that there were no differences between the boys’ and the girls’ AP on different SES classes, that the boys who were more mature obtained higher academic results than those who were less mature, that maturity was associated to the AP, and that this association was, in general, dependent on the association between the SES and the AP.

Keywords : Maturity; Academic performance; Reasoning ability; Socio-economic status.

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