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Reading achievement and attitude scores of a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) sample of 1,459 9-year-old students were multiply regressed on one another on home environment variables such as television watched, presence of newspapers, spare-time reading, dictionary use, kindergarten attendance, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, school characteristics, and other variables. The variances accounted for are moderate and highly significant; correlations and partial correlations of achievement with home environment, quantity of instruction, and leisure-time television watching corroborate quantitative syntheses of productive factors in school learning.

To probe a psychological theory of educational productivity, social studies achievement and attitude test scores of 2,426 13-year-old high school students were statistically related to each other and indicators of constructs that prior research shows are associated with learning out comes. In 8 linear and log-linear, ordinary least-square regressions with from 5 to 9 independent variables, several production factors are significant-socio-economic status, home environment, student-centered instruction, and time or amount of study; and item-learning correlations yield clues for improving learning productivity. Systems regressions, however, reveal ambiguity in the causal relations in that measurement error and exogenous and reverse causes may account for the significant findings.

The mathematics achievement scores of 28,274 students in 1443 Australian, Belgian, English, Finish, French, German, Israeli, Japanese, Dutch, Scotch, Swedish, and U.S. elementary schools were correlated with, and regressed on socioe‐conomic status, highest math course taken, weekly hours of homework, interest in mathematics, and several other variables with both individuals and schools within each country as units of analysis. The results corroborate recent syntheses of small‐scale studies of productive factors in academic learning as well as regression analyses of large‐scale surveys. Among directly alterable variables, the amount and the quality or vigour of instruction including homework most strongly influence achievement.

To test the hypothesized cumulative advantages of educative factors, the science-achievement scores on a 69-item test of science knowledge of 1,284 young adults, ages 26 to 35, surveyed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1977, were regressed on three composite independent variables: motivation and prior and current educative experiences. The test scores were related significantly to prior experience-embodied variables, such as parental socioeconomic status, respondent education, and specific scientific training, as well as to motivation to learn and current amount and intensity of information acquisition, such as news media exposure and reading. Early educative experience predicts current educative activities and motivation; and all three factors contribute significantly and independently to the prediction of achievement.

To probe the association of reading achievement and attitude with productive factors in learning, the scores of 2,300 17-year-old stu- dents from a National Assessment of Educational Progress sample were regressed on 18 indices of seven factors. The achievement correlations with the factors are close to the averages revealed by recent quantitative syntheses of bivariate studies. A considerable amount of the reliable or adjusted variance in achievement, 51%, is accounted for by motivation, frequency of spare time reading, radio listening, socioeconomic status, home environment, the use of English at home, race, and public-school attendance. Enjoyment of reading and self-concept as a reader are simi- larly accountable, but attitudes about the importance of reading and free- dom to read are less predictable. Syntheses (or meta-analyses) of experimental and quasi-experimental studies and correlational surveys reveal a considerable number of consis- tent moderate to large psychologically-productive effects on cognitive, af- fective, and behavioral aspects of classroom-learning outcomes (Walberg & Haertel, 1980). The productivity factors most closely connected with learn- ing may be divided into nine categories: student age, ability (as measured by IQ or prior achievement), and motivation (as indexed by interest in the subject matter or self-concept as a learner); time devoted to study; amount and quality or effectiveness of instruction (including self-instruction); psychological environments of the home, school, and peer group outside

The scores of 1,700 Japanese and 9,582 Illinois high school students on the High School Mathematics Test (containing 60 items on algebra, geometry, modern mathematics, data interpretation, and probability with an internal consistency reliability of .87) were regressed on background questionnaire measures of several factors in learning. Quantity of instruction and motivational variables emerge as the stronger statistically controlled correlates of mathematics achievement in both Japan and Illinois. In addition, older students did better than younger, and males outscored females in Japan. The two-standard-deviation achievement advantage of Japanese over Illinois students at three age levels dwarfs the differences within countries and may be attributable to unmeasured extramural factors as well as to superior quantity and quality of instruction in Japan.

A re-analysis of the cross-national data gathered by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) was undertaken to determine the magnitude, direction, and nature of differences in 17-year-old boys' and girls' attitudes and achievement in mathematics. A 10-item attitude scale and a 70-item achievement test were administered to 13,056 students attending school in ten countries. Sex differences in both attitude and achievement were small, but with few exceptions they favored males. Considerable variation existed between countries in the extent to which the achievement of boys exceeded that of girls, and in many cases, the magnitude of the differences was associated with psychosocial patterns found in the diverse cultures.