The Development Of School-Aged Children's Self-Concept And Its' Relation To Elementary School Teachers' Mental Health

Self-concept is individual's whole perception about oneself, which has the effects of self-regulation and self-orientation on the development of oneself. School age is an important period for children to develop their positive self-concept and teachers play a significant role in the formation of self-concept at that time. Although most educational theories suggest that teachers' mental health have definite effects on children's psychological development, especially the development of self-concept, there are few researches focus on the direct relations between teacher's mental health and students' psychological development. The first purpose of the project is to describe a full picture of the development of school-aged children's self-concept as well as the average level of elementary school teachers' mental health. Then, we try to find the relations between the aboved two variables.We sampled 1061 school-aged children, aged from 9 to 13, and 114 elementary school teachers from all urban elementary schools in Jinan. At first, the Piers-Harris Children's Self-concept Scale was used to investigate the general characteristics of school-aged children's self-concept. Then, we applied the Symptom Checklist 90 to evaluate the average level of elementary school teachers' mental health. At last, several statistical methods were employed to explore the relations between school-aged children's self-concept and the elementary teacher's mental health level.The results showed that: 1) Girls have a significantly higher self-concept score in most sub-scales and the total score than boys have, except for the scores on the sub-scale of body appearance and attributes and anxiety; 2) Children in different grades have different developmental levels of self-concept. The scores of self-concept on body appearance and attribution, and anxiety decreased with ages increased, while the scores on behavior, intelligence and school performance increased; 3) Elementary school teachers have significantly higher score on SCL-90 than normal population and the control group, especially on somatization, obsession, and depression; 4) Elementary school teachers who in charge of a class score higher than normal teachers on SCL-90, especially on somatization, anxiety, hostility and phobia; 5) Negative correlations were found between the score on school-aged children's self-concept and the score on SCL-90 of teachers who are in charge of classes, both at the individual level and the class level; 6) There are differences among the relations between teachers' score on SCL-90 and children's score on self-concept in different grade.From the results, we concluded that: 1) Gender difference and grade difference exist in the development of school-aged children's self-concept. To realize such a developmental rule will be useful in leading different children to form positive self-concepts; 2) Nowadays, Chinese primary school teachers' mental health is significantly worse than normal population, and teachers who are in charge of classes have even worse mental health than other teachers. We need to pay more attention to elementary school teacher's mental health; 3) Both at the individual level and the class level, school-aged children's self-concepts are significantly correlated with elementary school teachers' mental health. Thus, further researches on the causality of children's self-concept and teacher's mental health is necessary. Maintaining teachers' mental health may be a basilic measure for children's psychological development.