Abstract
The Big-fish-little-Pond effect is well acknowledged as the negative effect of class/school average achievement on student academic self-concept, which profoundly impacts student academic performance and mental development. Although a few studies have been done with regard to this effect, inconsistence exists in the effect size with little success in finding moderators. Here, we present a meta-analysis to synthesize related literatures to reach a summary conclusion on the BFLPE. Furthermore, student age, comparison target, academic self-concept domain, student location, sample size, and publication year were examined as potential moderators. Thirty-three studies with fifty-six effect sizes (total N = 1,276,838) were finally included. The random effects model led to a mean of the BFLPE at β = −0.28 (p < 0.001). Moreover, moderator analyses revealed that the Big-Fish-Little-Pond effect is an age-based process and an intercultural phenomenon, which is stronger among high school students, in Asia and when verbal self-concept is considered. This meta-analysis is the first quantitative systematic overview of BFLPE, whose results are valuable to the understanding of BFLPE and reveal the necessity for educators from all countries to learn about operative means to help students avoid the potential negative effect. Future research expectations are offered subsequently.
Highlights
In educational psychology, Academic Self-Concept (ASC) refers to students’ self-perception in specific disciplines or more general academic areas (Marsh et al, 2008a)
We present the first Meta-analysis of the Big Fish Little Pond Effect (BFLPE) synthesizing previous researches on the BFLPE to: (1) provide an integrated effect size of the BFLPE; (2) investigate whether the size of BFLPE will change when student age changes; (3) find out whether taking class-average achievement as comparison target will lead to different effect size compared with taking schoolaverage achievement as reference; (4) explore the influence of ASC domain on the size of BFLPE; (5) other potential moderating variables, such as sample size, publication year and student location were examined
We can see that Asian students indicate the strongest effect, while North American students show the weakest effect, and students in Europe, Oceania and mixed countries show the moderate effect. These results indicated that the BFLPE varies with student location of participants and indicates strongest in Asia
Summary
Academic Self-Concept (ASC) refers to students’ self-perception in specific disciplines (e.g., math self-concept, science self-concept) or more general academic areas (i.e., global/general ASC) (Marsh et al, 2008a). As a prominent construct in educational psychology, student ASC showed substantial positive relations with many desirable educational outcomes, such as academic effort (Traütwein et al, 2006), academic interest and long-term educational attainment (Marsh et al, 2005, 2007; Pinxten et al, 2010). Positive ASC is an important means of facilitating student academic accomplishments and has been regarded as one of the key objectives of education (Seaton et al, 2009), delving into the ASC forming process and revealing the forming mechanism make an impact both academically and practically. The Big Fish Little Pond Effect (BFLPE) is one of the most influential theories about student ASC forming process, which was proposed by Marsh (1984) to describe the phenomenon that students in selective schools always have lower ASC compared to those with comparable ability. Considerable evidence substantiated that the BFLPE is thought to be the outcome of individuals comparing their ability with the average ability of their group (Marsh, 1987; Plieninger and Dickhäuser, 2015)
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