Research Centre on Education

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“To g or not to g?” — Analysis of the dimensional structure of a cognitive abilities’ battery

Publication . Lemos, Gina C.; Peixoto, Francisco José Brito; Almeida, Leandro da Silva

tOver the past century there has been an extensive debate in Psychology over whether intelligencestructure is best represented through a single general ability, multiple specific abilities, or a hierar-chical structure of abilities. This study aims at contributing to this debate through an analysis of thedimensional structure of a cognitive abilities’ battery aiming to evaluate, in combination, differentiatedcognitive processes of increasing complexity (comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving) throughitems of different contents (verbal, numerical, and spatial). A Portuguese representative sample of 2546adolescents enrolled in secondary education participated in the study. Confirmatory factor analyses werecarried out and the results showed that: (1) the hierarchical model is the only presenting an acceptablefit to the data (RMSEA = .07; CFI = .96; TLI = .92), (2) the existence of specific factors cannot be neglected,and (3) contents of the subtests assume relevance to explain the levels of adolescents’ cognitive per-formance. These results are discussed taking into account the contribution of school experience for thedevelopment and differentiation of adolescents’ cognitive abilities.

2020Journal article

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Escala de Satisfação no Domínio Académico em Universitários Portugueses

Publication . Almeida, Leandro; Taveira, Maria do Céu; Peixoto, Francisco José Brito; Silva, José; Gouveia, Maria João

Students’ satisfaction has been valued as an indicator of the quality of higher education institutions, and as a relevant variable in explaining their involvement, learning and persistence. Satisfaction, associated to the diverse contexts of students' academic experience, is understood as a construct of students’ evaluation of the institution, academic climate, course and interpersonal relationships. Based on a sample of students from two Portuguese Higher Education institutions, one public and another private, we analyze the validity evidence of the Academic Domain Satisfaction Scale. The results of a confirmatory factorial analysis suggest the one-dimensional nature of the scale. On the other hand, adequate levels of internal consistency of its items, as well as significant correlations between the result in the scale and indicators of the students' affective disposition, academic performance and dropout intentions, point towards the validity of the measure.

2020Journal article

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