Increasing demands in schools, higher pressure on children’s performance levels, and increasing mental health constraints raise questions about the impact of educational achievement on children’s life satisfaction. Therefore, this study investigates whether children’s academic competence levels and school grades affect their life satisfaction and if the effects vary by educational track. Complementing prior research, this study firstly uses fixed effects regressions to get closer to the estimation of the causal link between children’s academic competencies, school grades, and life satisfaction by eliminating time-constant confounding factors such as intelligence, early background characteristics, and genetic factors. By using valuable longitudinal data on academic competencies, school grades, and life satisfaction of children from a sample of 5th-grade students (N = 3045) of the National Educational Panel Study in Germany (NEPS) from 2010 to 2015 this study reaches also a broader external validity than prior research. Including various tracks, makes testing for heterogeneous effects by school track attended possible. Results indicate that, on average, children’s school grades seem to be highly important for their life evaluations. Moreover, the effect of school grades does not vary across educational tracks, i.e. school grades seem to matter for all children. In contrast, levels of academic competencies seem to be relevant only for specific subgroups. Investigating effect heterogeneities reveals that only among children in the lower secondary school tracks higher competencies are related to lower life satisfaction. Overall, the study highlights the importance of school grades and point out variation in the relevance of competence levels between school tracks.

学校需求的增加、儿童成绩水平的压力加大以及心理健康限制的增加引发了关于教育成就对儿童生活满意度的影响的问题。因此，本研究调查儿童的学业能力水平和学校成绩是否影响他们的生活满意度，以及影响是否因教育轨道而异。作为对先前研究的补充，本研究首先使用固定效应回归，通过消除智力、早期背景特征和遗传因素等时间常数混杂因素，更接近于估计儿童学业能力、学校成绩和生活满意度之间的因果关系。 . 通过使用关于学术能力、学校成绩的有价值的纵向数据，N = 3045) 的德国国家教育小组研究 (NEPS) 从 2010 年到 2015 年，这项研究也达到了比先前研究更广泛的外部效度。包括各种轨道，使参加学校轨道的异质效应测试成为可能。结果表明，平均而言，儿童的学校成绩似乎对他们的生活评估非常重要。此外，学校成绩的影响不会因教育轨道而异，即学校成绩似乎对所有儿童都很重要。相比之下，学术能力水平似乎只与特定的子群体相关。调查效应异质性表明，只有在初中的儿童中，更高的能力与较低的生活满意度有关。全面的，