The Big-fish-little-pond Effect Of High School Students’ Academic Self-concept

Since 1976, Research shows that self concept isn’t a single structure but a multi lateral structure, which is divided academic self-concept and non academic self-concept by psychologist Shavelson, and academic self concept is wildly concerned by researchers. There is a special phenomenon in the development of academic self concept, which is named the big fish little effect. The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) predicts that equally able students have lower academic self-concepts (ASCs) when attending schools where the average ability levels of classmates is high, and higher ASCs when attending schools where the school-average ability is low. BFLPE means that students’ individual learning potential in different environments will get different development, in order to develop student’s potential ability we should consider the negative effects of BFLPE. Therefore, studying BFLPE is very necessary. The purpose of this study is to understand the development of academic self concept of BFLP. Here are the following two specific researches:The first research conducts the general academic concept from 919 high school students who are staying in the medium level and inspects their characteristic in general academic self concept by using questionnaire survey. Then it finds that their self assessment of academic development is not very positive.The second study mainly aimed at tracking investigation of general academic self-concept among high school students in different learning groups in the same school the same grade for examining the dynamic (longitudinal study) and static (cross-sectional study) changes. It aimed at conducting the dynamic changes of the general academic self-concept, comparing the development of academic self-concept of equal ability of students in different classes (Experimental Class, Regular Class). When the writer examined the correlation between academic self-concept and academic performance, finding that there is significant correlation between them except students of grade 2 in second-emphasis school. For the same ability of students in the same school entering into different types of class (Experimental Class, Regular Class), their general academic self-concepts may reduce or ascend. Among them, the low group and medium group in Senior Two of the key school exist the big-fish-little-pond effect.