GENERAL ABILITY AND INTEREST MEASURES AS DIFFERENTIAL PREDICTORS OF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

(1963) of the relationships among interests, abilities, and academic achievement, the hypothesis has been presented that a student’s general ability and interests in a subject contribute significantly to his academic achievement. Also it has been hypothesized that interest measures predict academic achievement in subject areas appropriate to the area of interest, but not in other unrelated areas. An implicit assumption that has not been distinguished from the above hypotheses is that student interest correlates with achieve-ment in the corresponding area because an instructor projects his own personal interests for a subject into his lectures and examina-tions, with the result that student-instructor interest agreement predicts learning better than student subject matter interest. To investigate this area, the present study explores the relative effectiveness of measures of general ability and interests for pre-dicting college level learning; the relative effectiveness of general ability and interest scores in contrast to special instructor interest and ability keys for such prediction; the relative effectiveness for different instructors of general and specific scores for interests and abilities for predicting grades; the degree to which similarity of in-structor and student interests predicts academic achievement; and the durability of the above relationships in crossvalidation