Effectiveness of Deductive Reasoning and Visuospatial Skills on Academic Achievement

Academic achievements are considered to be the benchmarks for entering in the next level of schooling and poor performance in academic skills reflects in the future of students. Academic achievement can be varied because of multiple reason and cognitive abilities play a major role among them. The present study aimed to assess the effects of few of the cognitive skills such as deductive reasoning, visuospatial attention, and visuospatial memory on academic achievement. There were 40 children within the age range of 5 to 7 years who participated in the study. Based on the academic performance in the annual examination, the participants were grouped into two. There were three tasks, each task designed to tackle different cognitive perspectives. The first task was odd one out intended to check deductive reasoning. Visuo-spatial memory was analyzed as second task where tokens were presented in complexity ascending order. Lastly, posner cueing was adapted to measure spatial attention based on the reaction time. Results showed that deductive reasoning and visuospatial memory skills were reduced in academically poor performing children, while the other group scored better scores in these tasks. Also, academically well performing students group had reduced reaction time of valid and invalid tokens for the spatial attention task which was prolonged in the opposite group. Correlation was assessed between their cognitive skills and the relationships between the variables were positive in both academic groups, however the strength of correlation was varied among the compared pairs.