The Associations Between Math Achievement and Perceived Relationships in School Among High Intelligent Versus Average Adolescents

ABSTRACT

Research regarding highly intelligent adolescents in Scandinavia is scarce. We know little about highly intelligent adolescents’ experiences with the school-system and how they experience their social relationships and relationships with their teachers. We used survey and test data from approximately 16,000 respondents from the Norwegian Armed Forces to investigate reported math grades and their potential associations with gender, teacher relations, and social relations with peers. Furthermore, we explored whether intelligence moderated these associations. Intelligence and teacher relations were positively associated with math grades, social relations were negatively associated with math grades, and the association was more negative for students with higher intelligence scores. The association with gender was moderated by intelligence. Among the students with higher intelligence scores, girls reported higher math scores than boys. Intelligence did not moderate the association between teacher relations and math scores, indicating that the teacher relationship is the same across all levels of intelligence.

KEYWORDS:

• Highly intelligent adolescents
• teacher-student relationships
• peer relationships
• mathematical achievement

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.