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Steve Elliott	Jim DiPerna	Christine Malecki

Academic skills are, and should be, the primary focus of instruction in schools. However, recent research suggests that student achievement also depends on academic enablers. Academic enablers are attitudes and behaviors that allow a student to participate in, and ultimately benefit from, academic instruction in the classroom. These enablers include motivation, interpersonal skills, engagement, and study skills.

UW-Madison educational psychology professor Stephen N. Elliott and WCER researcher James DiPerna maintain that enabling skills and attitudes can, and should, be taught explicitly to optimize students' learning. Their recent research finds that students' prior achievement and interpersonal skills influence motivation, which, in turn, influences study skills and engagement to promote achievement.

Study skills begin to assume a significant role in promoting achievement as students advance through the elementary school curriculum. Beginning in the intermediate grade levels, there is a shift in curricular emphasis from learning to read to reading to learn. The curriculum increasingly emphasizes content acquisition over skill development. Thus study skills assume a more significant role in the learning process.

In a related study, Elliott and former student Christine Malecki (now at Northern Illinois University) determined that interpersonal skills are a significant predictor of academic competence (the skills, attitudes, and behaviors that contribute to success); and academic competence, in turn, is a significant predictor of achievement. Elliott and Malecki concluded that social skills have a significant predictive relationship with academic outcomes.

There's more evidence to support the relationships between academic achievement and students' social skills, motivation, engagement, and study skills. This evidence comes from research using DiPerna and Elliott's Academic Competence Evaluation Scale (ACES). DiPerna and Elliott have found that academic enablers measured by ACES affect student grades and performance on standardized tests of achievement.

Implications of findings for practice

There are practical reasons for measuring academic enablers. School psychologists and other education professionals need a framework for thinking about assessment, intervention, and prevention services so they can help students receive optimal benefit from their education. Elliott points out that failing to address academic enablers may result in assessment and intervention plans that overlook key factors contributing to a student's academic difficulty.

Prior achievement is a strong predictor of current achievement (knowledge and skills). Likewise, current achievement is a strong predictor of future achievement. For students experiencing academic difficulty, chances for future academic success may be limited unless an educator intervenes to address specific problems. Delaying intervention to allow a students' skills to mature and possibly catch up to grade-level expectations may not be a wise choice, even for students at the primary level.

The DiPerna and Elliott study suggests that students' motivation, engagement, study skills, and interpersonal skills should be considered when designing assessments for students experiencing academic difficulty. For example, a practitioner who designs an assessment focusing exclusively on motivation and current academic skills may be overlooking important things that contribute to the student's academic performance (e.g., study skills, interpersonal skills). This omission could result in identifying the wrong cause of the academic difficulty. The educator also may develop an intervention that fails to address the true problem (e.g., difficulty getting along with others in class, which decreases a student's motivation to succeed in the classroom).

Since academic enablers contribute in meaningful ways to academic achievement, and the primary responsibility of schools and education professionals is to promote achievement, schools and educators need to consider what is being done to promote the development of academic enablers for all students.

The funding agent was the Northeast Foundation for Children and the Fitchburg (MA) Public Schools. For more information, contact DiPerna at jdiperna@facstaff.wisc.edu or Elliott at steve.elliott@vanderbilt.edu.

Information for this article originally appeared in School Psychology Review, 2002, vol. 31, issue 3, pp. 298-312.