SAT performance: Understanding the contributions of cognitive/learning and social/personality factors

Summary This study identifies a number of sources of individual differences in SAT performance by examining the simultaneous contributions of factors from two otherwise disparate research areas, namely cognition/learning and social/personality. Preliminary analysis revealed that just the cognitive/learning measures accounted for 37.8, 41.4 and 21.9% of the variance in SAT, V‐SAT and Q‐SAT performance, respectively while just the social/personality measures accounted for 21.4, 18.2 and 17.3% of the variance. When combined, cognitive/learning and social/personality factors accounted for even larger amounts of variance in performance; specifically 43.4, 44.6 and 28% for the SAT, V‐SAT and Q‐SAT, respectively. Finally, the results revealed that three measures consistently predicted performance on the SAT, V‐SAT and Q‐SAT; two measures were the learning/cognitive factors of working memory and integration of new text‐based information with information from long‐term memory and one measure was the social/personality factor, test anxiety. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.