Big fish in little ponds aspire more: Mediation and cross-cultural generalizability of school-average ability effects on self-concept and career aspirations in science.

Autor/inn/en	Nagengast, Benjamin; Marsh, Herbert W.
Titel	Big fish in little ponds aspire more: Mediation and cross-cultural generalizability of school-average ability effects on self-concept and career aspirations in science.
Quelle	In: Journal of educational psychology, 104 (2012) 3, S. 1033-1053Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; gedruckt; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0022-0663; 1939-2176
DOI	10.1037/a0027697
Schlagwörter	Selbstkonzept; Schule; Interkulturelle Differenz; Lernen; Begabung; Berufsziel; Wissenschaft; Leistung
Abstract	Being schooled with other high-achieving peers has a detrimental influence on students' self-perceptions: School-average and class-average achievement have a negative effect on academic self-concept and career aspirations - the big-fish-little-pond effect. Individual achievement, on the other hand, predicts academic self-concept and career aspirations positively. Research from Western and developed countries implies that the negative contextual effect on career aspirations is mediated by academic self-concept. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 (a total of 398,750 15-year-old students from 57 countries), the authors test the generalizability of this mediation model in science using a general multilevel structural equation modeling framework. Individual achievement was positively related to academic self-concept (52 countries) and career aspirations (42 countries). The positive effect on career aspirations was mediated by self-concept in 54 countries. The negative effects of school-average achievement on self-concept (50 countries) and career aspirations (31 countries) also generalized well. After controlling for self-concept at both the individual and the school level, there were significant indirect contextual effects in 34 countries - evidence for mediation of the contextual effect of school-average achievement on career intentions by academic self-concept. (ZPID).
Erfasst von	Leibniz-Institut für Psychologie, Trier
Update	2013/3