Continuous and ever fastening reorganization of work and working environments and subsequent changes in the knowledge and skills needed on the labor market have caused pressure to school systems worldwide to provide learners new tools to ensure them a fulfilling personal and social life, including employability across their lifespan (Levy, 2010; OECD, 2015).  Expected skills of future workers include, for example, being flexible to make decisions in complex situations with access to unlimited information combined with limited timeframes, and to adjust their actions and attitudes on-line with other workers having different cultural backgrounds. Workers must learn quickly, use the latest technological gadgets and programmes with ever-shorter life spans while leaning on and trusting their problem-solving skills (Halpern, 2008). On a global basis, educational decision makers have turned their attention to the learning goals that capture the essence of learners’ competence beyond the traditional curricular subjects. Broadly speaking, enhancement of students’ thinking skills has become almost an international educational movement while forming, through students’ empowerment and self-management of learning, the core of lifelong learning (Cattle & Howie, 2008). The related definitions are named key competencies, transversal skills, learning to learn, thinking skills, and 21st century skills (e.g., OECD, 2015). The common core for these new or newly introduced concepts is that they all capture the general cognitive competences underlying all subject-specific knowledge and skills as well as non-curricular domain-general skills along with the capacity to apply knowledge and skills to novel situations (Vainikainen, Hautamäki, Hotulainen, & Kupiainen, 2015). Therefore, it is no wonder that education for thinking has recently received considerable interest in the literature and at an organization level (Kuhn, 2005; OECD, 2010). This gradual change of working conditions and related skills have affected educational policy making, leading to changes in learning goals visible in various national curricula (e.g., EDUFI) aiming at equipping new generations with such skills and competencies that will help them respond to the future challenges of working life. In Finland, there is an over 15-year-old tradition to assess learning to learn competences and motivation for lifelong learning (Hautamäki & Kupiainen, 2014). The Finnish Learning to Learn framework comprises two interdependent constructs, a cognitive component representing competence in thinking or reasoning, and an affective component representing attitudes or motivational beliefs. Cognitive competence is measured by tasks covering reading comprehension, basic mathematical operations, deductive and analytical reasoning, and formal operational thinking. These are all understood to be malleable skills that develop by maturation and can be further developed and fostered by good teaching (e.g. Adey et al., 2007). Motivational component entails both self-related and context-related beliefs and attitudes, and assessed by diverse self-report questionnaires (Hautamäki & Kupiainen, 2014). Theoretically, the development and interplay of these two components can be explained by neo-Piagetian cognitive approaches and self-perception theory (e.g. Adey et al. 2007; Harter, 1999). Here, we study longitudinally (2011 – 2016) how the Finnish learning to learn framework holds psychometrically and how cognitive competencies and motivational beliefs develop through the Finnish secondary education, first through lower secondary education (grade 7 to 9,N = 9497, 50 % girls) and continuing the follow-up to a third measurement point at the second year of academic track upper-secondary education.

Research Question: What are the autoregressive and cross-lagged effects of cognitive competence and positive and negative motivational beliefs across the three time points of seventh (T1) and ninth grades (T2) and upper-secondary second grade (T3)? Research Question 2: Are there gender differences in students’ cognitive competence and positive and negative motivational beliefs the three time points of seventh (T1) and ninth grades (T2) and upper-secondary second grade (T3)? We will first examine the stability of cognitive competence and positive and negative motivational beliefs through the measurement points T1, T2, & T3. Next, we will examine the three constructs. Third, we will investigate the gender effect in and of them. Participants The longitudinal data were collected in 2011, 2014 and 2016 (grades 7, 9 and 11, respectively) from all students in the Helsinki Metropolitan area (14 municipalities). Participants in the baseline data (grade 7, 12– 13 years) had just started lower secondary school (N = 9497; 50.4% girls). Of the original cohort, 6880 students (15–16 years) participated in the grade 9 follow-up at the end of compulsory school. The final sample included only the academic track students who participated in all three-waves of the study (N = 2712). The study was supported by the education authorities of the 14 municipalities and approved by the Ethics Committee of the National Institute for Health and Welfare. Measures Cognitive competence was measured with three tasks: Control of Variables, Invented Mathematical Concepts, and Missing premises (Ross & Ross, 1994) taken from the Finnish Learning to-Learn Assessment Battery (Kupiainen, Vainikainen, Marjanen, & Hautamäki, 2014) and measuring reasoning in a different domains. Positive motivational Beliefs: Agency: effort and Achievement orientation; Negative motivational beliefs: Avoidance orientation and Causal attribution: chance (Hautamäki & Kupiainen, 2014). All analyses were conducted using longitudinal structural equation modelling (SEM) with Mplus 8.0. The models were estimated using robust maximum likelihood (MLR) estimator used in conjunction with full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation to cope with reasonable number of missing responses. Model fit was evaluated considering a wide range of descriptive goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., Marsh et al. 2004), the comparative fit index (CFI), the Tucker Lewis index (TLI), the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR), which are reported with the traditional chi-square statistic and the corresponding degrees of freedom.

After establishing measurement invariance across time-points, autoregressive and cross-lagged effects of cognitive competence and the two motivational constructs were examined through panel design. Fit indices were deemed adequate (CFI = 0.928; TLI = 0.917; RMSEA = 0.036; SRMR = 0.042; χ2 = 4102.064/ 901; p < 0.0001). The results showed that students’ cognitive competence, avoidance orientation and effort were rather stable, while there was considerable fluctuation in achievement orientation and causal attribution of chance from lower to upper secondary school. Grade 7 motivational beliefs did not predict cognitive competence at grade 9 but cognitive competence at grade 7 was linked to higher achievement orientation and lower causal attribution of chance at grades 9 and 11. Grade 7 avoidance orientation was negatively linked to effort at grade 9 but achievement orientation positively to avoidance orientation at grade 9. Grade 9 effort was positively linked to cognitive competence and achievement orientation and causal attribution of chance negatively to avoidance orientation There was no gender difference in students’ cognitive competence at grade 7 while girls scored higher than boys at grade 9 and boys higher than girls at grade 11. However, all effect sizes were small (ƞ=.05–.08). Except for boys’ stronger avoidance orientation there were no gender differences in students’ motivational beliefs at grade 7. At grades 9 and 11, girls reported higher positive motivational beliefs (achievement orientation and effort), while boys reported higher negative motivational beliefs (avoidance orientation and causal attribution of chance). Overall, the results show that the Finnish Learning to Learn framework holds and provides clear illustration for the development of cognitive competences through secondary education (cf. Vainikainen et al., 2017). While cognitive competence seems to develop steadily, the effect of effort seems crucial and strengthens with time.

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