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Comparing Standardized Measures of Diligence and Achievement with Dental Student Academic Performance

Dr. Jedrychowski is Professor in the Section of Pediatric Dentistry and Dr. Lindemann is Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Personnel—both at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Dentistry. Direct correspondence to Dr. Robert Lindemann, UCLA School of Dentistry, Box 951668, Room 53-038 CHS, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1668; 310-825-1425 phone; 310-794-7734 fax; robertl{at}dent.ucla.edu. Reprints will not be available.

Key words: achievement, diligence, educational assessment, predictors of student performance

Submitted for publication 09/27/04; accepted 02/01/05

	Abstract

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Utilizing a reliable and valid instrument to measure a student’s application of energy and effort towards a goal (diligence) or the ability to reach goals (achievement) would enable dental educators to anticipate academic performance. This knowledge could be used to better distribute faculty and educational resources, as additional tutors could be provided for students who score low on diligence and achievement instruments. In this study, fourth-year dental students completed the Diligence Inventory and the NachNaff Scale (which measures desire to achieve) immediately prior to graduation. The scores from both inventories were correlated with nine measures of academic performance. For males, the NachNaff Scale positively correlated (p<.05) only with the quantity of exceptional performance reports (EPR) and for females negatively correlated only with science DAT scores. The modest positive correlations, which differ for gender, suggest that the NachNaff may be of limited use to predict dental student performance. For males, the Total Diligence mean positively correlated with EPR and National Board Parts I and II scores. For females, the Total Diligence mean positively correlated with EPR and a predental biology-chemistry-physics grade composite. Given the simplicity of the Diligence Inventory and its significant correlations with academic performance demonstrated in this study, it appears to be a useful tool to gain insight into students’ diligence in striving to obtain goals.

Conversely, these instruments may identify students whose academic success may require additional focus or a more structured educational environment. If the instruments could accurately identify students at risk, more time and effort could be dedicated to those students early in their studies rather than on remediation efforts. Remediation carries with it the negative connotation of failure and may have psychological effects such as contributing to low self-esteem.

Early studies of the types of achievement and their relation to real-life performance variables stimulated considerable interest among psychologists and sociologists.¹ Several questionnaires were developed as a result of this interest, but when correlated with one another or with real-life performance, the results have been disappointing.² Lindgren proposed that achievement could be measured in the context of affiliation, which refers to an individual’s desire to please others and form social relationships with others.³ Personality researchers generally concur that an individual’s drive to achieve varies in inverse proportion to other drives that interfere with achievement. The drive or need to affiliate has been theorized to be least compatible with achievement, which has led to the supposition that achievement and affiliation are negatively correlated.⁴ In this context, students motivated by achievement exhibit behavior oriented toward self in contrast to students who are motivated by affiliation and whose behavior is oriented toward positive social interaction. Simplistically, it has been found that students tend to earn higher grades when they spend more time studying and less time socializing.

Studies addressing the operational definition of diligence suggest that it implies more than study skills. Bernard and Schuttenberg suggest that motivation and volition are subsumed under the term "diligence," linking it to both quality and quantity of effort.⁵ Volition is a self-regulatory mental process that engages the mind for the transition of goals or intentions into action.⁵ As diligence and achievement are both broadly defined, it is likely that they are not mutually exclusive characteristics, and therefore some crossover may exist in their measurement. Jasinevicius et al. applied the Diligence Inventory-Higher Education (DI-HE) to four classes of dental students at one time at a private university.⁶ There were no significant differences between the diligence scores among the four classes The authors found significant relationships between grade point averages and DI-HE scores only in males and advised further investigation of the instrument with other dental student populations and especially to examine the gender differences, which were an "unexpected finding."

The purpose of this investigation was to compare senior dental students’ scores on the DI-HE, which measures diligence, and the NachNaff Scale, which measures achievement, with nine areas of student performance to determine if either instrument predicted academic success. The DI-HE was selected because it is targeted toward higher education and it had been tested with dental students at another university. The NachNaff Scale appealed to us because it purported to measure achievement motivation, which paired well with the simultaneous measure of diligence, both characteristics thought important when applied to dental education.

	Methods

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Seventy-five fourth-year dental students volunteered to complete the DI-HE⁵ and the NachNaff Scale⁷ immediately prior to graduation. Forty-two of the students were male, and thirty-three were female. They were informed that all information would be treated confidentially. There were nine students who chose not to respond. The instruments were not modified in any way for the current study.

The Diligence Inventory-Higher Education (DI-HE) is a self-analysis questionnaire, designed for students in higher education, consisting of forty-eight statements with responses on a five-point Likert scale. The DI-HE measures "Total Diligence," which includes five scales: Motivation, Concentration and Assimilation, Conformity and Citizenship, Discipline, and Responsibility. The scales are defined as follows: Motivation—the drive to get started and persist along a certain course of action with an intended result in mind; Concentration and Assimilation—the act of focusing attention on a problem, task, or impending situation through a process by which all new experiences, when received into the consciousness, are modified so as to be incorporated with the results of previous processes and the interaction in which a subject or its parts are mentally conceived; Conformity and Citizenship—the practice of maintaining harmony with the customary behaviors expected in an organized setting by demonstrating maturity and respect for supervisors and peers; Discipline—the training of the will; and Responsibility—the practice of fulfilling assignments and obligations in a timely and thorough manner.

The DI-HE has been shown to possess acceptable characteristics of validity and reliability (coefficient alpha of .904).⁵

The NachNaff Scale is a thirty-item, forced-choice method of measuring achievement using negatively correlated adjective pairs for achievement (Nach) and affiliation (Naff). It is based on the assumption that people who show the need for affiliation have less concern for achievement and therefore achievement and affiliation are incompatible.⁷ The NachNaff has been validated with other scales of achievement.⁸

The scores from both inventories were correlated with nine measures of academic performance. Five were predental measures: entering grade point average (GPA); entering grade point average for biology, chemistry, and physics (BCP); overall Dental Admission Test scores (DAT); science Dental Admission Test scores (SCI); and the perceptual motor ability test score (PAT) from the DAT. Four were dental school performance measures: National Board Part I and II examination scores (NBI, NBII) and total number of UCLA School of Dentistry Exceptional Performance Reports (EPR), which are awarded to the top 10 percent of the class in a course, and unsatisfactory EPR (U EPR) which are given to students performing below a passing grade. In a "pass-non pass" system, the EPR is a performance measure that can be related to grades.

	Results

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Differences (p<.05, paired t-test) in the nine academic performance measures between male and female subjects are depicted in Table 1. In the study population, males (n=42) had higher PAT and NBII scores. Females (n=33) had a higher entering GPA and BCP. All other performance measures were similar.

Table 2 displays the correlation coefficients for all students by gender for each variable. For males, the Total Diligence score positively correlated with NBI, NBII, and EPR and negatively correlated with UEPR (p<.05, Pearson correlation coefficient r values). Of the five Diligence scales, Motivation and Responsibility both had the identical positive correlates as Total Diligence. The Concentration scale correlated with NBI and EPR, and the Discipline scale did not correlate with any measure.

Table 3 reports that, prior to the analysis, students were also separated into three equal strata (high, mid, and low performance) for each of the nine measures of academic performance (GPA, PAT, etc.). High achievers and low achievers in each performance measure were identified, and their mean diligence and achievement scores were compared (the mid groups were not analyzed). The means and statistical significance are reported in Table 3. There were significant (p<0.5, paired t-test) differences in the Total Diligence means of high and low achievers in the GPA, BCP, EPR, and UEPR performance measures. High GPA achievers posted significantly higher means for four of the DI-HE scales than low achievers (not Discipline). Of the scales, Motivation revealed the most significant differences between high and low achievers, GPA, EPR, and UEPR.

The NachNaff means of high and low achievers in each area of student performance are shown in Table 3. Only the NachNaff means of high NBII and high EPR achievers were significantly (p<0.5, paired t-test) higher than low achievers.

	Discussion

Top Abstract Methods Results Discussion Conclusion References

 
Rapid, simple tests to evaluate diligence and achievement were administered to dental students. Significant correlations were found between both instruments and measures of student academic performance (predental and dental), which suggests that they could be considered as predictive instruments. The value of an instrument measuring diligence or achievement lies in the identification of students with potential problems or potential success earlier in the curriculum rather than later. These instruments may also be useful to administer to matriculating students prior to their entry into dental graduate programs.

The achievement drive has proven to be an elusive item to measure accurately. Lindgren constructed the NachNaff Scale after being influenced by personality research that suggested that a negative correlation exists between achievement and affiliation.^4,9 Studies that employed the NachNaff demonstrated a correlation between high grades and high achievement scores.^3,7,10,11

In the current study, the NachNaff Scale did correlate positively with grades (EPR), but for males only. The combined-gender, high EPR performance group (Table 3) also showed higher NachNaff means than the low EPR group. Females showed a negative correlation with NachNaff and the SCI portion of the DAT; however, the significance of this negative correlation is not known. One might assume that high achievers would positively correlate with high results in SCI.

Given that the dental student means were similar to NachNaff norms, the limited positive correlations (which differ for gender) suggest that the NachNaff may be of limited use to predict dental school academic performance, although it was associated with higher EPR and NBII scores. Based on these findings, the simplicity of the NachNaff may make it desirable to administer as an adjunct to other measures used to predict academic success, but only if other studies replicated the predictive capacity of this instrument.

The DI-HE was significantly correlated with more of the performance measures, especially for males. All three major measures of dental school academic performance (EPR, NBI, NBII) correlated with Total Diligence and two of its scales, Motivation and Responsibility. Concentration/Assimilation correlated with NBI and EPR. Further, a negative correlation with Total Diligence (and three of its scales) and UEPR (non-pass grades) confirms the relationship of Diligence with dental school performance among this group of senior dental students. The significant positive correlation of DI-HE with EPR for females (0.36) and males (0.56) suggests that Total Diligence (and the Motivation scale) could be used as a predictive instrument for dental school academic performance for both genders. This finding differs from that of a previous study using the DI-HE, which found no significant correlation between the DI-HE scores and GPA for females.⁶ In that study, like the current study, male and female participants were similar in terms of grades (GPAs or EPR), but females had significantly higher DI-HE scores than males. The stronger correlation coefficient between the DI-HE scores and grades for males in the current study and the lack of correlation for females in the previous study suggests that capturing a prediction of diligence may be influenced by gender.

Why male, and not female, Total Diligence means correlated with NBI and NBII scores is not clear. It may relate to gender study patterns for internal exams (EPR) versus external exams (NB). It may also relate to gender differences in NB performance, which several studies have noted, but clear and repeatable patterns of performance have not emerged.^12–14

Neither instrument positively correlated with the Dental Admission Test measures (DAT, SCI, PAT), and only one instrument correlated with the other predental performance measure (females Total Diligence and BCP). Students with higher DAT scores in this population achieved higher NBI and NBII scores, which is consistent with other studies.^15,16 In any case, these predental parameters could not be considered as important as dental school performance measures, which are the only ones dental educators could predict and potentially influence.

Because the participants were senior dental students, one might assume that the results of this study may have greater significance for graduate program directors than for predoctoral educators. In a previous study, the authors found no difference in the means of the DI-HE between the four predoctoral classes.⁶ This finding suggests that most students’ goal-seeking behavior (diligence) was not modified by the dental education. Given the competitiveness for dental school, it is not surprising to find that entering dental students are diligent. The dental curriculum may not possess the qualities to further enhance existing diligence motivation.

	Conclusion

Top Abstract Methods Results Discussion Conclusion References

 
As other instruments to predict student performance are developed, perhaps specifically for dental students or adapted for dental student use, they should be tested in the context of the dental curriculum, both didactic and clinical. Based on the results of this study, the DI-HE appears to be a useful approach for programs seeking prospective insight into student energy and effort toward academic goals. The NachNaff may be useful as an adjunct to the DI-HE to reveal a student’s potential ability to reach these goals. It is important that future studies continue to test these instruments on other dental school populations, increasing the overall number of subjects and concentrating on potential differences between classes and between genders.

	REFERENCES

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This Article Abstract Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Jedrychowski, J. Articles by Lindemann, R. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Jedrychowski, J. Articles by Lindemann, R.