The Adolescents’ Self-concept: Developmental Characteristics, Relationship With Academic Achievements, And Cross Culture Comparison

Self-concept is one’s perception of himself/herself. It includes the recognition of all theaspects about himself/herself, such as appearance, personality, ability, attitude, and socialinteraction. Since1960’s, self-concept became to be an important research question. Currently,most of the researches which related to self-concept are using the method of cross sectioncomparison. Less longitudinal researches are conducted. Therefore, the aim of this study is toexamine the developmental characteristics of adolescents’ self-concept and its relationshipwith academic achievements. Then conduct a cross culture study to examine the differencesbetween Chinese and American adolescents’ self-concept.In this study, first using the longitudinal research method to explore the developmenttendencies and gender differences of adolescents’ self-concept. Because of that longitudinalmethod has the shortages such as lack of participants, then using cross section research toexamine the age and gender differences of adolescents’ self-concept. Furthermore, by theeffects of adolescents’ self-concept on academic achievements are studied. At last, a crossculture comparison is conducted to discover the differences of self-concept between Chineseand American adolescents.The results show that:(1) There are significant age differences of the self-concept among11to15years old adolescents. Middle school time is a critical period of self-concept’sdevelopment. With the increasing of age, the development pattern of adolescents’ self-conceptis curved, which means that adolescents’ self-concept decrease first, then increase.(2) Thegender differences of adolescents’ self-concept are significant as well. Generally speaking,girls have higher scores of their self-concept than boys.(3) There are significant relationshipbetween adolescents’ self-concept and academic achievements. The academic achievements ofa15years old adolescent can be predicted by several aspects of his/her11years olds’self-concept, such as moral self-concept, the peer relationship self-concept and theself-concept of the relationship with adults.(4) Comparing to American adolescents, Chineseadolescents’ self-concepts are significant higher on the domain of group, intelligence, selfcontrol, academic and peer relationships. On the self-concept domain of independence,appearance, and self confident, Chinese adolescents’ scores are lower than Americans.