The Association of Social Emotional Constructs and Academic Motivation with Academic Achievement in Adolescents

In this cross-sectional study, we examined the association between eight socio-emotional constructs (empathy, global self-concept, happiness, prosocial behavior, optimism, anxiety, depression, and academic motivation) and academic achievement in a diverse sample of 583 high school students in order to see which ones are most useful in predicting academic achievement. We also examined the associations separately for African American and European American students, as these groups had substantial numbers of students. Results indicated that optimism, anxiety, and motivation were statistically and significant predictors of achievement, with motivation contributing the most variance. Both groups had similar results, but African Americans had five meaningful predictors of achievement while European Americans had three. The findings suggest that these constructs may be useful in helping to improve academic performance in students.

performed in. The present study aims to address that lacuna in the literature and conduct an exploration for high school students in the suburbs of a Mid-Atlantic state.
We first review the conceptualization of social and emotional well-being used in the current study. Then, we discuss the different constructs that are used to evaluate it. Finally, we present a study examining the association between these constructs and academic achievement.

Social and Emotional Well-Being
There is no single definition for social and emotional well-being. However, there are two general ideas in this area that are most frequently discussed: social and emotional well-being and social and emotional learning (SEL). The latter term is more often used in the context of intervention programs designed to increase levels of social and emotional well-being; it is defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) to encompass five constructs: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness (Core SEL Competencies, 2020). The former term typically refers to the capacity to form positive social relationships, self-regulate emotion and behavior, cope with stresses, and engage in productive tasks (e.g., learning, working). There is a growing body of literature suggesting that social and emotional constructs are related to students' academic outcomes (Schonert-Reichl, 2011;Worrell & Andretta, 2019).
In this study, we used the theoretical framework of social and emotional well-being put forward by the Human Early Learning Partnership at the University of British Columbia (Schonert-Reichl, 2011). This group studied several different dimensions of children's well-being, including social and emotional development, physical health, and use of after-school time. The social and emotional part of their framework includes seven different constructs, five which represent emotional well-being (empathy, global self-concept, happiness, prosocial behavior, and optimism) and two which represent emotional distress (anxiety and depression). The developers were willing to share their survey instruments and the framework was accessible for our purposes. We now provide brief overviews of all the constructs and discuss their associations with academic outcomes. Our interpretation of the literature is guided by C. J. Ferguson's (2009) concept of minimally interpretable effect sizes (.41 for d and g; .20 for r and β). We describe findings with these levels of effect size as meaningful or practically significant.

Positive Social Emotional Constructs
Empathy can be described as the "ability to sense other people's emotions" as well as to "imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling" ("What is empathy," n.d.). It can be described as emotional version of perspective-taking (VandenBos, 2007). In a study of adolescents using a structural equation model, Zorza et al. (2013) found that empathy was associated with social competence (β = .20, p < .005), which in turn was associated with academic performance (β = .43, p < .001). Happiness has been defined as both a "fleeting positive emotion" and a "deeper sense of purpose and meaning in life" ("What Is Happiness," n.d.), and has been studied in age groups from infants through adults. In a study of undergraduate college students, Langevin (2013) found that happiness, operationalized as a person's subjective love of life, self-regard, and level of optimism, explained 6% (β = .24, p < .05) of the variance in academic performance, more so than age, gender, and ethnicity. Coffey (2019) found that infant positive affect predicts childhood IQ (β = .20, p < .05) and adult academic achievement (β = .18, p < .05).
Prosocial behavior has been defined as an intent to help others (VandenBos, 2007), and includes altruism, cooperation, and caregiving ("Prosocial Behavior," n.d.). Gerbino et al. (2018) found prosocial behaviors significantly predicted (β = .185, p = .032) better grades in the short term and over time in middle and high school. These authors concluded that prosocial behavior is a "strength and resource for adolescents' academic attainment" (Gerbino et al., 2018, p. 247). Optimism reflects the attitude that "things happen for the best"; optimists "anticipate positive outcomes" and "expect good things to happen to them and to others" (VandenBos, 2007, p. 651). In a large sample of early adolescents attending middle school in Germany, optimism was found to have only small associations with academic achievement (β < |.10|, p < .001) and self-esteem (β = .08, p < .001; Tetzner & Becker, 2018). However, Worrell and Andretta (2019) reported that optimism was positively correlated with school belonging (r = .25, p < .001) and academic self-concept (r = .24, p < .001), and negatively correlated with perceived barriers to college (r = -.35, p < .001), all of which are related to achievement outcomes. Global self-concept is one of the most frequently assessed constructs in psychology and can be defined as an "individual's belief about himself or herself, including the person's attributes and who and what the self is" (Baumeister, 1999, p. 339). Existing research suggests that self-esteem or global self-concept has negligible associations with academic achievement (e.g., Marsh & O'Mara, 2008), with academic self-concept being more closely associated with achievement outcomes.

Negative Social Emotional Constructs
Anxiety is "an emotion characterized by apprehension and somatic symptoms of tension in which an individual anticipates impending danger, catastrophe, or misfortune" (American Psychological Association, n.d.). Anxiety can be classified into general anxiety, test anxiety, among others. Perhaps not surprisingly, test anxiety was found to have a more deleterious effect on academic performance than general anxiety in a sample of children and adolescents aged 8-13 (Carey et al., 2017). However, several aspects of anxiety, including worry and physiological anxiety, have been shown to have negative impacts on achievement outcomes. For example, in a study of 40 children between the ages of 6 and 13, intervention-induced decreased anxiety predicted improved school performance (-.125 ≤ β ≤ -1.108 for different subdomains of anxiety) and social functioning (-.043 ≤ β ≤ -1.013; Wood, 2006).
Depression is a "negative affective state, ranging from unhappiness and discontent to an extreme feeling of sadness, pessimism, and despondency, that interferes with daily life" (American Psychological Association, n.d.). Research on adolescents has generally shown students with depressed moods or symptomology have a higher risk of academic failure. For example, Tyson (1996) concluded, from a review of case studies, that the shift into adolescence, if accompanied by underlying depression, can cause academic underachievement or even failure. A study on Canadian adolescents from low socioeconomic secondary schools found that there was a predictive relationship (β = .21) between depression symptoms and school dropout that was mediated by academic self-esteem (Quiroga et al., 2013).

Academic Motivation
Although not one of the social emotional constructs in the Human Early Learning Partnership framework, we also examined academic motivation in this study. Academic motivation has been described as a student's persistence and level of interest (McGrew, 2008). Motivation has been found to affect academic achievement in high school students consistently albeit primarily indirectly (total effect: β = .104) through "variables such as coursework and homework" (Keith & Cool, 1992 p. 214;Wong & Csikszentmihalyi, 1991). Froiland et al. (2016) found that teacher autonomy support had an indirect association with math achievement in high school students via intrinsic motivation for mathematics (βs of .52 and .23, respectively). Thus, it is possible that the influence of social emotional constructs on achievement may be via their association with motivational constructs.

Academic Performance
Academic achievement, operationalized as cumulative GPA, is the primary outcome in this study. Participation in social and emotional learning programs in elementary school children has generally have been found to correlate with higher math grades (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015). Ashdown and Bernard (2012) found that explicit instruction in social and emotional skills in elementary school children had a positive effect on levels of social and emotional well-being and reading achievement and a negative effect on behavioral problems. Schonfeld et al. (2015) found that a social and emotional learning program in elementary school students resulted in higher levels of basic proficiency in reading, writing, and math, and that these results held across race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status.
There is a growing body of literature on the usefulness of perception-based variables in enhancing academic achievement in students. For example, Sheard et al. (2013) suggested that social and emotional learning was a vehicle for at-risk students to succeed. A mindfulness-based social emotional learning program was found to enhance students' quarterly grades in reading and science (Bakosh et al., 2016). Emotional intelligence has been found to predict academic performance in high school and college students (ρ = .24; MacCann et al., 2020). Wilson and Buttrick (2016) noted that interventions focused on students' beliefs about themselves and their environments can lead to improved long-term academic performance. Indeed, Lin-Siegler et al. (2016), in a special section of the Journal of Educational Psychology, highlighted several studies reporting on how student perceptions can affect their motivation and achievement. However, Dixson (2019) pointed out that some perception-based variables get more attention than others. For example, although both hope and positivity have been found to predict student achievement and other educational outcomes, current American educational policy neglects these areas, whereas grit and growth mindset receive considerable attention in the public sphere. Dixson also argued that perception-based constructs can be incorporated into school-based interventions and used to guide policy changes. These findings indicate that social-emotional constructs have the potential to directly affect students' academic performance and hence point to the usefulness of filling a gap in the literature on high school students. Adolescents often face myriad mental health issues, and since they are at the cusp of starting higher education and/or entering the workforce, a better understanding of factors related to their well-being and academic performance is crucial-especially so given the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The Present Study
As noted in the review of literature, although social and emotional well-being constructs have been found to relate to academic achievement, there is limited research regarding this association in high school students. Much of the currently available research that suggests that social-emotional well-being is predictive of later academic achievement has focused on young children. Many studies that include adolescents do not reflect the breadth of social emotional constructs included here but instead focus on one or two variables. It is likely that some social and emotional well-being constructs are more important in predicting achievement than others. Other studies examine SEL interventional programs in high school students (e.g., the ones covered in the meta-analysis by Sande et al. (2019)), but these studies largely examine the effects of an intervention on some social and emotional outcomes for students, rather than the association of the range of social and emotional variables with academic performance. Thus, it makes sense to examine these constructs together to understand their unique contributions to academic outcomes.
In the present study, we assessed the association between eight constructs-the seven social and emotional well-being constructs reviewed above in addition to academic motivation-and academic performance in a sample of high school students. We hypothesized that the social and emotional well-being variables would predict a meaningful amount of variance in academic performance. In addition to examining this hypothesis in the whole sample, we also examined it in the two ethnic-racial groups with more than 100 participants (i.e., African Americans and European Americans), as a growing body of research indicates that psychological findings do not always generalize across cultural groups (Leath et al., 2019;Worrell, 2014) and that African American students are often at a disadvantage with regards to achievement and well-being (Gamble, 2021). For example, a study of elementary, middle, and high school students from one school district found that the association of social and emotional learning with grades was significantly stronger for European-American students than for students of other racial groups (Jones et al., 2020). Before examining the relationships among the social emotional constructs and achievement, we examined the psychometric properties of scores on the social emotional variables in this sample. Findings based on scores that are psychometrically unsound are less likely to replicate.

Participants and Setting
This study was conducted in a suburban public high school in a mid-Atlantic state. The participants were 583 students in Grades 9 (36.5%, n = 213), 10 (18.9%, n = 110), 11 (17%, n = 99) and 12 (26.1%, n = 152). The sample included students from several ethnic-racial groups, including African Americans (35.3%, n = 206), European Americans (41.5%, n = 242), Hispanic Americans (9.9%, n = 58), Asian Americans (5.7%, n = 33), and multi-racial (5.5%, n = 32) individuals. Nine students did not report grade level or ethnicity/race. Twenty four percent of the sample (n = 144) did not report gender and the remaining students were roughly evenly split between males (38.3%, n = 223) and females (37.0%, n = 216). Thirty-eight individuals who did not complete entire subscales were excluded from data analyses. The average GPA of the entire sample was 3.06 (SD = 0.90). The mean GPA for the two subgroups large enough to use in group-specific analyses was 2.86 (SD = 0.85) for African American students and 3.14 (SD = 0.93) for European American students. Students were not asked to provide information on socioeconomic status, but the county that the school's students come from is middle-class to upper middle-class (median family income = $97,000).

Procedure
Data collection occurred in the 2017-2018 school year. The study was approved by the county school district's Office of Research. Informed consent was obtained by an online signature. Confidentiality was accomplished by having students' IDs on the survey linked to their school GPA by school administrators; this identifier was removed prior to surveys being sent to the researchers. The online survey was administered to students during class counseling sessions. Students were informed that they would be participating in a study aimed at understanding more about their well-being and were asked to complete the online survey. The timing of the surveys depended on when during the year each grade level had their counseling session. The senior class completed the survey in September, and participants in the other grade levels (9 th , 10 th , and 11 th ) in February and March. Some classrooms in each grade were not administered the survey by counsellors because of limited time. Missing data were more frequent for questions at the end of the survey than at the beginning. Missing data were imputed using the expectation maximization algorithm, with the percentage of missing data ranging from zero to 3.6%.

Measures
As noted previously, the social emotional well-being framework used in this study includes seven constructs: jedp.ccsenet.org Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology Vol. 12, No. 2; empathy, global self-concept, happiness, prosocial behavior, optimism, anxiety, and depression. The instrument was a modified version of the MindUp survey developed at the University of British Columbia. This survey was originally developed to measure several aspects of child wellbeing and includes questions on thirty constructs, and we keep items relevant to the seven social emotional constructs and academic motivation construct discussed above. Questions on the survey are drawn from a variety of instruments in the extant literature. We present validity information for each of the constructs below. We also validate the scores for students in this particular sample as some of these instruments have not been used with adolescents previously.
Empathy was assessed using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980(Davis, , 1983 modified for children (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2012). This 14-item index measures both empathetic concern and perspective taking. For the present study, only the seven questions relating to empathetic concern were used. The empathy questions assess the feeling of concern for other people (e.g., "Sometimes I feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems"). Students rate each item on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = not at all like me, 5 = always like me). An average empathy score was computed with higher scores representing higher levels of empathy. Schonert-Reichl et al. (2012) reported Cronbach's alphas of .80 and .86 for empathetic scores.
Happiness was measured using the 5-item Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) adapted for adolescents (Gadermann et al., 2010). A sample question is, "In most ways, my life is close to the way I would want it to be." Respondents rated their level of agreement on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = disagree a lot, 5 = agree a lot). Ratings on the 5 items are averaged to create a general happiness score where higher numbers indicate greater levels of happiness. Cronbach's alpha estimates for scores have been in the .83 to .90 range for middle and high school students (Gadermann et al., 2010;Guhn et al., 2018;Lang & Schmitz, 2020).
Prosocial Behavior was measured using the prosocial questions on the Social Goals Questionnaire (Wentzel, 1993). Prosocial questions (e.g., "How often do you try to share what you've learned with your classmates?") are rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = never, 5 = always) and ratings are averaged to create a total prosocial score, with higher scores representing higher levels of prosocial behavior. This scale is comprised of two subscales-a 3-item peer prosocial subscale (α = .82) and a 3-item academic prosocial subscale (α = .78; Wentzel, 1994). In this study, we used the total score based on the six items.
Optimism was measured using the Resiliency Inventory (Noam & Goldstein, 1998;Song 2003). The nine optimism items (e.g., "Even if there are bad things, I'm able to see the good things about me and my life") assess thoughts on the future and perspectives on the world. Participants respond on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = not at all like me, 5 = always like me). Higher scores represent higher levels of optimism. A study using the optimism subscale score yielded a Cronbach's alpha of .69 (Oberle et al., 2010).
Global self-concept was measured using the subscale from Marsh's (1984) Self-Description Questionnaire-II. This questionnaire assesses several aspects of self-concept, but only global self-concept items were used. The eight questions assess self-described abilities (e.g., "I do lots of important things"), rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = never, 5 = always). Responses were averaged to create a general average score for self-concept with higher scores representing higher global self-concept. There is extensive reliability and validity evidence for these scores in students. Gilman et al. (1999) reported internal consistency alpha estimates of in the .80 range for global self-concept scores and reported a test-retest reliability coefficient of .70.
Anxiety and depression were measured using the seven anxiety and 11 depression items on the Seattle Personality Questionnaire (Asher & Wheeler, 1985;Kusché et al., 1988;Ladd, 1990). Items for both anxiety (e.g., Academic motivation was measured using the Academic Goals Questionnaire (Roeser et al., 1996). The scale consists of nine items (e.g., "I'm certain I can learn the skills taught in school this year") assessing academic motivation and participants respond to the items on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = not at all like me, 5 = always like me).
Ratings are averaged, and higher scores represent higher levels of academic motivation. Cronbach's alpha for these scores was found to be .86 (Roeser et al., 1996).
Information relating to demographics and academic performance was obtained from school administrators, who matched student data in school records with student survey responses using student identification numbers. Demographic data included race and gender. Cumulative GPA was used as the indicator of academic performance in the study.

Preliminary Analyses
We began by examining the structural validity, internal consistency, and convergent validity of all the scores to assure that valid inferences could be drawn from the analyses. The structural validity of the scores was assessed using confirmatory factor analyses with Mplus 8 (Muthén & Muthén, 2012. One-factor models using the weighted least squares estimator, recommended for ordinal data, were run, with fit criteria including the comparative fit index (CFI), Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). Based on recommendations for scales using item-level indicators (e.g., Marsh et al., 2004;Perry et al., 2015), CFI and TLI values ≥ .90 and RMSEA values ≤ .08 were used as indicative of acceptable fit. Results for the final models are presented in Table 1. CFI and TLI values were in the excellent range for the empathy, global self-concept, happiness, and anxiety scores and in the acceptable range for prosocial behavior, academic motivation, and depression scores. RMSEA values were in the poor range.
The model for optimism scores had poor fit on all indices. Subsequent analyses indicated that models including only the positively worded or negatively worded items fit well. Thus, we kept the four positively worded items, and, as can be seen in Table 1, CFI and TLI values for scores based on these four items were in the excellent range and the RMSEA value was in the acceptable range. Factor coefficients for items on all the scales were in the good to excellent range (Comrey & Lee, 1992). As at least two of the three indicated good fit and the items all had strong factor coefficients, the models were accepted. Internal consistency estimates are presented in Table 2. Alpha estimates are presented for scores in the total sample and for subgroups with more than 100 individuals. Omega estimates were also calculated for scores on the total sample using the coefficients from the confirmatory factor analyses. The estimates for all variables were acceptable (i.e., > .70); only the estimates for optimism were less than .85. Means and standard deviations are presented in Table 3. The distributions had low skewness (-0.55 to -0.06) and kurtosis (2.05 to 3.09). Females had a higher mean GPA (d = 0.41) than males and reported meaningfully higher empathy (d = 0.48) and anxiety scores (d = 0.45) than males, in keeping with extant literature. Females also had higher scores on prosocial behavior, global self-concept, optimism, academic motivation, and depression, but the effect sizes were small (ds < .28). European American students had higher scores on GPA (d = 0.28), happiness (d = 0.18), and prosocial behavior (d = 0.21) than African American students, but the effect sizes were small. All other differences between these two groups had even smaller effect sizes (ds < .12, p > 0.006). Intercorrelations among the variables are reported in Table 4. Meaningful correlations (i.e., > .20; C. J. Ferguson, 2009) tended to be in keeping with theory and provided convergent validity evidence in support of the study constructs. Happiness, optimism, and academic motivation had strong correlations with global self-concept, and prosocial behavior was associated with empathy and academic motivation. Anxiety and depression were positively correlated and had moderately strong to strong negative correlations with optimism, prosocial behavior, and happiness. Finally, academic motivation had a moderate correlation with GPA.   Table 5 presents a regression analysis on cumulative GPA. Although the equation was significant (p < .001) and five coefficients made statistically significant contributions to GPA (p ≤ .006), only optimism, anxiety, and academic motivation had betas > .20, with academic motivation being largest. Based on the adjusted R 2 , the model accounted for 19% of the variance in achievement. The models for African Americans and European Americans yielded similar results. The model for African Americans accounted for 19.5% of the variance and five coefficients had betas > .20: empathy (β = .21), optimism (β = .26), academic motivation (β = .35), happiness (β = -.33), and anxiety (β = .21). The variables with meaningful betas in the equation for European Americans were optimism (β = .27), academic motivation (β = .39), and anxiety (β = .24), accounting for 18% of the variance.

Discussion
In this study, we investigated the association between eight constructs (seven social and emotional variables plus academic motivation) and academic performance in adolescents. We hypothesized that the social and emotional variables would predict a practically significant amount of variance in academic performance. We also examined this hypothesis in the African American and European American students in our sample. As hypothesized, the social and emotional variables did indeed predict a meaningful percentage of variance in academic performance, with academic motivation contributing the most variance. The results were mostly similar for the two ethnic-racial groups we looked at, with empathy and happiness contributing to GPA for African Americans but not European Americans.
Broadly, these findings are in line with studies across many age groups that have indicated, for example, that academic achievement is associated with several dimensions of emotional intelligence in high school students (Parker et al., 2004); that constructs drawn from positive psychology can help explain academic motivation and achievement in middle school students (Pajares, 2001); that social and emotional interventions can improve academic achievement in middle school students (Borman et al., 2019); and that social-emotional variables are associated with academic achievement in elementary school students (Berger et al., 2011).

Psychometric Properties of Scores on Subscales
Given the increased emphasis on replicability and the fact that the reliability and validity of scores are specific to a sample, we examined both the internal consistency and structural validity of the scores on all the subscales. The results supported the psychometric integrity of most of the scores, suggesting that they could be used in this sample. However, scores on optimism had poor fit driven in part by the fact that half of the items must be reverse-coded.
There is a growing literature indicating that reverse-coded items may compromise the scores in adolescent samples, suggesting that it may be useful to reduce response set by means other than negatively worded items. In addition to looking at internal consistency and factor structure, we also examined the intercorrelations among the social and emotional variables as a way to examine convergent and discriminant validity of the scores. The intercorrelations were in keeping with theory, providing further support for the utility of the constructs in the current sample.

Associations of Social Emotional Constructs with GPA
We found that although five of the variables made statistically significant contributions to GPA, only optimism, anxiety, and academic motivation made practically significant contributions. These results generally support results of other studies examining the effect of social and emotional learning programs on children (Durlak et al 2011;Schonert-Reichl et al. 2015;Ashdown & Bernard 2011) that have shown that participants receiving social and emotional learning programming reflect greater gains in academic achievement relative to peers who do not receive such programming. Additionally, our results parallel the findings put forward by Datu and Wang (2019) where motivation in Filipino high school students was found to be a potential mechanism through which academic buoyance-which refers to students' capability of dealing with routine obstacles in various school contexts-could be associated with academic achievement.
In this study, anxiety and GPA had no meaningful bivariate association. Some researchers have found that better self-concept is indicative of greater test anxiety in high school students (e.g., Hyseni Duraku & Hoxha, 2018), but other studies looking at general anxiety have revealed negative relationships between the two (Putwain et al., 2020). One possible explanation for the differences across studies is the anxiety-performance association, which contends that performance peaks when arousal is neither very low nor very high, represented by an inverted U-shaped curve (Sweeney et al., 1970).
One interesting difference that we found in patterns of association between the variables and GPA was that for European Americans, optimism, academic motivation, and anxiety were meaningful predictors of GPA, whereas for African Americans, happiness and empathy were as well. A plausible explanation could be that the two groups experience broadly different social environments in the US and in schools in particular-a hypothesis worthy of further study. Many reports have discussed the racial gap in GPA. R. F. Ferguson et al. (2001) concluded that for Black students, the negative racial messages they often face and the poorer preparation they may receive in comparison to their White peers may contribute to this gap. In terms of happiness, Iceland and Ludwig-Dehm (2019) found that although the Black-White gap narrowed between 1972 and 2014, it still remains substantial. For prosocial behavior, Voight et al. (2014) found that the racial "behavior gap" may be conditional on school environment and that levels of prosocial behavior by racial group vary with the racial composition of the school. Additionally, Lozada et al. (2017) found that an oppression analysis and school-based discrimination had direct effects on prosocial behavior. These findings point to the fact that the achievement and well-being gap between African Americans and European Americans is still substantial. Many current social and emotional resources do not take race into account, so it may be beneficial for future programs to consider how best to account for this gap.

Implications for Practice
Can the results of this study be used in high schools, and will they be useful to school psychologists? The answer to these questions is clearly in the affirmative and has implications for school psychology practice moving beyond the assessment of students for special education services to greater roles in intervention and consultation. School psychologists can work with administrators and teachers to develop and conduct whole-school assessments of jedp.ccsenet.org Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology Vol. 12, No. 2; social-emotional factors to identify possible areas for intervention. Interventions can then be targeted to specific grade levels or subgroups or can be instituted school-wide. In some states, such as California, these data are already collected (e.g., the California Healthy Kids Survey) and school psychologists can help administrators interpret and act on the data from the site-specific reports.
For example, in the current study, academic motivation was important in predicting GPA. There are several interventions that can be used to increase levels of academic motivation. Yeager et al. (2014) showed that an intervention that promoted a self-transcendent purpose for learning increased high school mathematics and science grades via deeper learning of materials and self-transcendent purpose was associated with a lower likelihood of dropping out of college years later. Rozek et al. (2017) helped parents convey the value of mathematics and science courses to their high school children, resulting in not only increases in course taking in those fields, but also increased scores on standardized tests. Interventions to increase motivation have also benefitted students from elementary school to college, and importantly, these interventions can be scaled up (Pauneski et al., 2015). A recent school psychology handbook contains chapters on increasing sense of belonging, facilitating cross-ethnic friendships, delaying gratification, and cultivating hope in students from diverse backgrounds (Worrell et al., 2020).
Studies such as this one are important for the field for several additional reasons. First, they highlight for school psychologists the importance of interventions from the educational and social psychological literature that are not typically published in the school psychology literature (McKevitt, 2012). Second, they provide a data-based rationale for school psychologists to pay attention to social emotional learning and psychosocial constructs more generally (Bernard et al., 2017;Ross et al., 2002). Third, they focus the attention of practicing school psychologists on theories and groups that should receive greater attention in school psychology, given the ongoing achievement and opportunity gaps (Worrell, 2014).

Limitations
This study had several limitations. First, taking the survey was voluntary; moreover, as the survey was administered by school counselors based on whether they had time at the end of their session, it is possible that entire classes of students did not get the chance to take the survey. The data are from only about 30% of the school population. Thus, the results may not be representative of the school population. Second, the study was conducted at only one high school due to limitations imposed by the school district's office of research. Thus, the sample does not represent the school district. Future studies should include a representative sample of district.
Third, data was collected within one school, and even though students may have had the same classroom or teacher, those data weren't collected as part of the study. So, we were not able to examine the contributions across levels.
Fourth, this study was cross-sectional, limiting our conclusions to only associative relationships between GPA and well-being. Longitudinal studies would be needed to make causal inferences. Fifth, we used cumulative GPA as the measure of academic performance. The cumulative GPA of a freshman and a senior encompass one year and four years of information on academic performance, respectively. These differences could explain the associations being detected for students of different years. A way to address this in the future could be to use the GPA of the most recent semester. Sixth, as is the case with many samples, the conclusions of this study are not generalizable to the entire American high school population without replications. The results are applicable in the context this study was performed in, which may make the results more useful in the local context.
Lastly, previous literature points to availability of resources to families as a driver of student well-being (e.g., Jaggers et al., 2016). Also, greater perceptions of racial/ethnic discrimination have also been linked to greater psychological distress and lower academic motivation and academic achievement (Benner et al., 2018). We did not measure either socioeconomic status or perceptions of discrimination but doing so may have yielded additional insights in comparing ethnic-racial groups.

Conclusion and Future Directions
We examined the relationship between social and emotional well-being and motivation and academic performance in adolescents and found that social emotional variables are indeed associated with academic performance. Consequently, social emotional learning programs may be useful in affecting the trajectory of academic functioning in high schoolers, a direction for high schools to explore further. The study also calls for more research on the causal relationship between well-being and academic performance in high school students to determine whether intervention methods for well-being are different in this age group than for younger age groups, whether the nature of the relationship changes by age group, and how best to address the race gap in achievement and well-being, in line with comments from researchers who have said more rigorous research is still needed to "identify the most potent strategies for social and emotional skills development" (Barry et al., 2017, p. 434).

Funding Statement
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethics Statement
Approval for the study was granted by the Office of Research of the public school district for the county in which this study was conducted. There was no approval number but there was an approval given via an approval letter.

Declaration of Interest Statement
We have no competing interests to declare.

Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.