The relationships between school achievement and peer relationships have been studied for decades (e.g. Berndt et al., 1990). Whereas earlier research usually reported about the positive correlation of peer acceptance – being liked by classmates– and school achievement perhaps due to a positive correlation between social intelligence and cognitive competences (Cillesen & Van den Berg, 2012), it has been shown later that peer groups can be very different in how much they value academic goals (Chang, 2004; Hamm et al., 2012; Jackson, 2006; Wentzel et al., 2012). As there have been relatively few longitudinal large-scale studies with representative data, there is still only limited knowledge about the causality of these relationships and the effects that different school- or class-level peer cultures can produce.   

This study is conducted in Finland where between-school differences are small (OECD, 2012) but between-class differences are typically very large (Yang Hansen et al., 2014). That is, classes in the same school can have a very different average performance level – as is the case between schools in many other countries.  Classes or schools may also have different peer cultures in regard to how acceptable it is to succeed academically, and this can in turn influence pupils’ later achievement. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to fill some of the gaps in the international literature about the complex relationship of peer acceptance and school achievement by utilising longitudinal representative educational assessment data of 10 to 13 years-old pupils. In this age children undergo developmental changes and according to earlier studies, at this age beliefs and attitudes begin to be related to performance (Demetriou & Kazi, 2006) and also to decline (Vainikainen et al., in press), and group-level performance differences begin to increase (Vainikainen, 2014).

The specific research questions are:

1. Does fourth grade school achievement predict fifth grade peer acceptance?

2. Do peer acceptance and prior school achievement together predict later school achievement in sixth grade?

2. Is the relationship between peer acceptance and school achievement different in classes with low average performance level, average-performing classes, and high-performing classes?

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