<p>Both <a href="https://psychology.stanford.edu/cdweck" rel="nofollow">Carol Dweck</a> and <a href="https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/research" rel="nofollow">Angela Duckworth</a> have fairly brief tests meant to measure student success and by some extension grades. </p>

<p>Dweck's work focuses on how having a "fixed mindset" limits a students ability to grow in a subject and is used to explain why students are so apt to give up when met with challenge. Her <a href="http://mindsetonline.com/testyourmindset/step1.php" rel="nofollow">quiz</a> would have to be formatted for pen and paper and her research is rather sparse on the subject.</p>

<p>Duckworth focuses on both grit and self-control. She has researched heavily the effects of grit over the last 10 years while Walter Mischel works on self-control and has been for the past 40 years. Duckworth was Mischels student. Unfortunately, his test for self-control would likely be too abstract for your needs.</p>

<p>Needless to say her work has been shown to measure student success over the last ten years. Her <a href="https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/research" rel="nofollow">website offers several quizzes</a> on grit or self control for adults and students. The same links provides access to her publications. </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-20T02:58:40.570Z
2016-02-20T02:58:40.570Z
Reed Rawlings
<p>I'm planning to do a survey with students (age around 16) with questions/answer-possibilities that have been 'proven' to be significant indicators of student success/good grades. So, I'm not really interested in the relationship of the variables to the outcome, instead, I want to feed the data of the survey to a machine learning algorithm to check the algorithm's correctness.</p>

<p>Instead of coming up with the questions of the survey myself, I would like to ground them academically, i.e.: based on academic literature. I don't need very 'original' ones, the significance of the variables themselves is not the focus of my research (actually, I want 'proven' significant variables).</p>

<p>Best case scenario would be to find a canonical list of survey questions and answer-possibilities which have been 'proven' to be influential (significant) indicators of student success/grades, from which I can take the ones appropriate for my research.</p>

<p>Another thing that would be help me is a source which discusses good and bad practices for setting up a survey such as mine (which might also point me to the questions I want to ask).</p>

<p>I have found some papers, such as (Sykes &amp; Kuyper, 2009) about predicting student success/grades, from which I can pick some variables/questions, but none of them were close enough to my case to be fully satisfactory for my purpose. If anyone can help me with a good paper that investigates roughly the same as my research, this would also help, as I might then base my survey (partly) on this research.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-11T14:41:39.623Z
Adding some links to the papers you have read would be helpful. (:
Seanny123
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-17T05:58:29.547Z
Some types of IQ tests are commonly used to predict academic achievement with some success - is this the sort of thing you had in mind?
Arnon Weinberg
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-17T08:52:46.510Z
Thanks for your answer. I'm more looking for 'simple' features like motivation (what kind of questions would measure this in a good way for example?) and personalia (which have been 'known' to influence performance?). I'm aiming for a relatively simple survey, purely to get some data on the features to feed to the ML algorithm. An IQ test for example, is too complicated for my purpose. I want to do the survey in approx. 15 mins.
matthijs
<reference-request><methodology><experimental-psychology><educational-psychology><survey>
Ground a student survey in academic literature
matthijs
# Ground a student survey in academic literature

(Asked by: username_0 on 2016-02-11)

I'm planning to do a survey with students (age around 16) with questions/answer-possibilities that have been 'proven' to be significant indicators of student success/good grades. So, I'm not really interested in the relationship of the variables to the outcome, instead, I want to feed the data of the survey to a machine learning algorithm to check the algorithm's correctness.

Instead of coming up with the questions of the survey myself, I would like to ground them academically, i.e.: based on academic literature. I don't need very 'original' ones, the significance of the variables themselves is not the focus of my research (actually, I want 'proven' significant variables).

Best case scenario would be to find a canonical list of survey questions and answer-possibilities which have been 'proven' to be influential (significant) indicators of student success/grades, from which I can take the ones appropriate for my research.

Another thing that would be help me is a source which discusses good and bad practices for setting up a survey such as mine (which might also point me to the questions I want to ask).

I have found some papers, such as (Sykes & Kuyper, 2009) about predicting student success/grades, from which I can pick some variables/questions, but none of them were close enough to my case to be fully satisfactory for my purpose. If anyone can help me with a good paper that investigates roughly the same as my research, this would also help, as I might then base my survey (partly) on this research.

**Tags:** reference-request, methodology, experimental-psychology, educational-psychology, survey

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Adding some links to the papers you have read would be helpful. (:  
> **username_2**: Some types of IQ tests are commonly used to predict academic achievement with some success - is this the sort of thing you had in mind?  
> **username_0**: Thanks for your answer. I'm more looking for 'simple' features like motivation (what kind of questions would measure this in a good way for example?) and personalia (which have been 'known' to influence performance?). I'm aiming for a relatively simple survey, purely to get some data on the features to feed to the ML algorithm. An IQ test for example, is too complicated for my purpose. I want to do the survey in approx. 15 mins.  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2016-02-20. Score: 1

Both [Carol Dweck](https://psychology.stanford.edu/cdweck) and [Angela Duckworth](https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/research) have fairly brief tests meant to measure student success and by some extension grades.

Dweck's work focuses on how having a "fixed mindset" limits a students ability to grow in a subject and is used to explain why students are so apt to give up when met with challenge. Her [quiz](http://mindsetonline.com/testyourmindset/step1.php) would have to be formatted for pen and paper and her research is rather sparse on the subject.

Duckworth focuses on both grit and self-control. She has researched heavily the effects of grit over the last 10 years while Walter Mischel works on self-control and has been for the past 40 years. Duckworth was Mischels student. Unfortunately, his test for self-control would likely be too abstract for your needs.

Needless to say her work has been shown to measure student success over the last ten years. Her [website offers several quizzes](https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/research) on grit or self control for adults and students. The same links provides access to her publications.


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