The Big Fish Little Pond Effect On Academic Self-concept

Self-concept is the core of individual personality development, which plays an important role in orienting and adjusting individual's behavior and is deeply connected with the perfection of individual's personality and social development.Since Shavelson, Hubner and Stanton divided self-concept into academic and non-academic one in 1976,academic self-concept has grabbed wide and deep attention of educational psychologists and personality psychologists. By far, most nations and regions have considered cultivating positive academic self-concept as an important aim in education. Academic self-concept can not only significantly predict individual's academic achievement, but can also be a key medium factor of some other mental and educational results, and is closely relevant with other factors, such as individual's subjective happiness,adaptation and academic emotion. All in all.it is an important impact factor to predict students' mental health condition.The big fish little pond effect(BFLPE) is a major module to explore the formation mechanism of academic self-concept. It predicts that the academic self-concept of students attending higher-level classes or schools will be lower than that of their peers with the same capacity who attend lower-level classes or schools. This is analogous to the old saying that it is better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion. Thus,BFLPE offers new directions for individuals' academic development, grouping ability and school choosing.Even though the BFLPE has been verified in most nations and regions, it hasn't been systematically studied in the mainland China, where students' academic score is highly emphasized while their healthy development of academic personality is ignored, due to the strict senior high school and college entrance examinations. So, it is urgent to systematically explore whether the BFLPE also exists in the classes aganist the regime and culture of education in mainland, thus to guide teenagers'individual development, as well as the establishment and implementation of educational policy.The present study combined both cross-sectional and longitudinal investigations.Four junior schools were randomly chosen from some region of Chengdu city in southwest China, which included 2,370 students of three grades from two key junior schools and two ordinary ones in the cross-sectional study. While in the longitudinal study, 785 students from two of the above schools, which include one key school and one ordinary school, were tracked three times since the first term in junior high school.The results indicated that:(1) The academic self-concept of students in the mainland junior school and the corresponding dimensions were above average. Further, the academic self-concept,the control of academic behavior and the value of academic score of the students in the key class were significantly higher than that in the ordinary class. However,there was no significant difference in the perception of academic capacity and experience of academic emotion between them.(2) The BFLPE did widely exist in the class of junior high schools in mainland China. Besides, the individual academic score positively predicted the academic self-concept,while the average score of the class negatively predicted the academic self-concept.(3) The longitudinal study indicated that the BFLPE influenced the academic self-concept of the junior high school students durably and stably, but the stability of influence on different dimensions of academic self-concept was inconsistent.