Students’ effort is considered a major factor in their educational development, but scant research has purposefully focused on it and its links with academic achievement. The aims of this research were to examine how student- and teacher-rated effort uniquely predict achievement gains at student and classroom levels (controlling for student covariates, together with prior effort and achievement). Data were collected from 1,548 secondary school students and 72 teachers in 114 mathematics classes from Years 7-10 in nine Australian independent schools. Analyses included multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, multilevel path analysis, and follow-up latent profile analysis. Findings demonstrated that across the whole sample, teacher-rated effort uniquely predicted students’ academic achievement gains at both individual student and classroom levels, but student-rated effort did not. Follow-up person-centred analysis revealed profiles for whom self-rated effort did predict growth in academic achievement. Thus, employing complementary variable- and person-centred analyses, this investigation was able to highlight specific and unique ways in which effort is associated with students’ achievement gains.

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