Students’ Cognitive Ability and Its Relationship with Academic Achievement and Motivation: Do Gender and Cognitive Ability Level Make a Difference?

We examined relationships between students’ cognitive ability and school marks, academic self-concept, and intrinsic motivation in mathematics and in the verbal domain by gender. Our sample comprised 621 girls and 621 boys (mean age = 9.68 years, SD = 0.70), matched for class, age, first language, and parental education. Gender differences between measures were negligible, except for mathematics self-concept that was higher for boys. Using confirmatory factor and latent regression analyses, for both genders we found the strength of the relationship between cognitive ability and school marks or motivation to be comparable, and the relationship between ability and motivational variables could be described as linear. However, whereas for boys higher ability levels were associated with better school marks, for girls with higher ability levels this association leveled off. Our findings suggest that in elementary school, gender differences in achievement interact with students’ cognitive ability levels to the detriment of high-ability girls.