Abstract
The social context plays a decisive role in the formation of the academic self-concept (ASC) and has been widely studied as the big-fish-little-pond-effect (BFLPE). This effect describes that comparable talented students in high-achieving school settings have a lower ASC compared to equally talented students attending low-achieving settings. Past research has focused on students’ domain-specific ASC, while little is known about the relation of achievement-related classroom compositions and the various facets of ASC. Additionally, BFLPE-research has been critiqued to build its theoretical frame on social comparison theory, without providing sufficient empirical support. To address this gap, we analyzed how the single student’s social, criterial, absolute, and individual ASC relate to class-level achievement of 8th graders. Applying Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling (MLSEM) we found that all facets of ASC were significantly related to average-class achievement, while student’s social ASC revealed the strongest associated. The results reveal explicitly that average-class achievement is strongly related to social comparison processes.
Highlights
The academic self-concept (ASC) has been established as one of the key constructs that determines academic success (Valentine et al, 2004) and shares vital structural characteristics with academic interest (Gogol et al, 2016)
Before we designed the final Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling (MLSEM), we tested a serious of four separate unconditioned models for each facet of ASC, which included only the outcome variables
The current study investigates the BFLPE among high-abilitytracked students in 8th grade, relating average class-level grades to a student’s social, absolute, criterial, and individual ASC measured by SESSKO (Schöne et al, 2002)
Summary
The academic self-concept (ASC) has been established as one of the key constructs that determines academic success (Valentine et al, 2004) and shares vital structural characteristics with academic interest (Gogol et al, 2016). Following a rather broad definition, ASC is formed through academicrelated experience and interpretations, combining attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions a student has about his or her own abilities and skills within the school context (Marsh and Hattie, 1996; Lent et al, 1997). Current research has widely shown that the domain-specific ASC of high-achieving students (e.g., in subjects such as math, languages, biology, and physics) is impacted by the composition of the class (Köller and Baumert, 2001; Dumont et al, 2017; Stäbler et al, 2017) as well as by the composition of the school (Harker and Tymms, 2004; Köller et al, 2006; for an overview see Marsh et al, 2008). The present study addresses this gap by examining how these four facets of ASC are related to students’ overall grades at the class level
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