Debdulal Dutta Roy Sumona Datta
Indian Statistical Instituete, Kolkata Government General Degree College, Singur
Murshida Khatoon
GITAM School of Humanities and Social Science, Vishakapatnam
Verbal reasoning and its contribution to measuring students’ success in the academic
realm is an emerging area of research in school psychology. Students need to
understand and reason using concepts that they acquire in the classroom to learn well
and perform well during various academic assessments. The present study aimed at
predicting academic achievement with verbal reasoning abilities namely, similarities-
based reasoning, synthesis, syllogistic reasoning, data sufficiency, and coding. A verbal
reasoning test battery and an academic achievement test were administered to a sample
of 2083 adolescent students. Logistic regression analysis was fitted on the data. Success
in academic achievement was treated as the outcome variable, whereas the five verbal
reasoning abilities were the predictor variables. Results showed that the logistic model
fitted to the data correctly, classifying 77.9% of the cases. Also, all five verbal reasoning
abilities were found to be significant predictors of success in academic achievement
with synthesizing ability being better than the other abilities. The significance of various
domains of verbal reasoning in the prediction of academic achievement was established
through this study.