The relationship of three measures of childhood depression to academic underachievement

Clinical features of depression (short attention span, lethargy, poor memory and shortened task persistence) appear to be incompatible with effective learning. This has led several investigators to suggest that depression is a significant cause of academic underachievement. The most adequate test of this hypothesis (Tesiny, Lefkowitz, & Gordon, 1980), however, found only small correlations between depression and academic achievement when neither IQ nor socioeconomic status were controlled. In the present study, three measures of childhood depression (Peer Nomination Inventory for Depression, Children's Depression Inventory, and an ad hoc teacher rating) were correlated with scores from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test and the Stanford Achievement Test. IQ was statistically controlled to provide a direct measure of underachievement and analyses were conducted separately for males, females, and the combined sample in a sample that was homogeneous for socioeconomic status. Although intercorrelations among the variables indicated that the sample was appropriate to test the hypothesis, only a few significant correlations were found. These findings suggest that if depression causes academic underachievement, it is a weak or uncommon effect.