Are science competitions meeting their intentions? a case study on affective and cognitive predictors of success in the Physics Olympiad

Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research

Table 2 Means, standard deviations, and correlations of unscaled predictor variables

Variables	M	SD	EXSU	VACO	SEEF	SOSU	GCAB
Affective variables
Expectancy of success (EXSU)	2.56	0.48
Values assigned to the competition (VACO)	2.86	0.63	0.19*
Self-efficacy (SEEF)	3.32	0.57	0.32***	0.25**
Social support (SOSU)	2.52	0.52	0.17	0.04	0.01
Cognitive variables
General cognitive abilities (GCAB)	0.65	0.88	0.20	0.01	0.16	− 0.15
Physics problem solving ability (PPSA)	7.57	6.74	0.12	0.15	0.09	0.03	0.38***

Note M = mean; SD = standard deviation
*p ≤.05
**p ≤.01
***p ≤.001. The statistics of the general cognitive abilities data correspond to the Rasch-modelled person abilities