Cognitive Skills, Learning, and Academic Performance in Higher Education

Abstract

Cognitive skills have fostered a renewed consideration of intelligence, aiming to clarify the meaning and determinants of its components to predict cognitive and academic performance. In higher education, research has traditionally focused on institutional, pedagogical, personal, and contextual variables to evaluate student transition and adaptation, learning difficulties, and academic success. The objective of this study was to analyze the relationships among cognitive skills, learning strategies, and academic performance. Additionally, it included a factor analysis to assess the validity and reliability of a learning scale, identifying items that best represented three selected factors: self-regulation, information processing, and self-efficacy. The final empirical study involved a sample of 194 first-year students across three degree programs: Psychology, Business Administration, and Computer Engineering. Results suggested moderate relationships between cognitive skills and academic performance measures, and weak relationships between cognitive skills and learning strategies. Differences in cognitive skills, learning strategies, and academic performance were observed according to sociodemographic variables, with sex, age, academic major, admission grade, and parental education level proving relevant. The combined impact of cognitive, learning, and sociodemographic variables suggests that sex, working memory, and self-regulation possess explanatory capacity for the variance in academic performance.