Medical X-Press – Staff Writer 
Educational and developmental psychologists have tried to understand how skills and motivation are linked to academic achievement. While research supports ties between individuals’ concepts of their abilities and their achievement, we lack a complete picture of how these relations develop from childhood to adolescence. A new longitudinal study looked at how youths’ self-concepts are linked to their actual academic achievement in math and reading from middle childhood to adolescence. The study found that students’ self-concepts of their abilities in these two academic domains play an important role in motivating their achievements over time and across levels of achievement. . (more)